|
electronic journal of contemporary japanese
studies
Discussion Paper 1 in 2004
First published in ejcjs on
3 March 2004
How to contribute to
ejcjs
Ideology,
Academic Inventions and Mystical Anthropology
Responding to Fitzgerald's Errors and Misguided Polemics
by
Ian Reader
e-mail the Author
This article was written in order
to respond to arguments made in Tim Fitzgerald’s article in the JAWS
Newsletter (Japan Anthropology Workshop) in November 2002 and to correct
factual errors in it. Since Fitzgerald’s article (amended in November 2003
at the time my response was published) has since been posted as a discussion
paper on this site, my response, too, has been included here, with slight
amendments made to incorporate amendments made by Fitzgerald in the article
as posted here. Please find below a reference and link to Fitzgerald's
discussion paper.
Fitzgerald, T. (2003)
'Religion' and 'the Secular' in Japan: Problems in history, social
anthropology, and religion, electronic journal of contemporary japanese
studies, Discussion Paper 3 in 2003, First Posted on 10 July 2003.
Editor's comment: The
editorial team at ejcjs make
every effort to eliminate errors of a linguistic or factual nature. However,
as our team members receive no payment for their services, we must rely on
the goodwill and professionalism of our contributors. Therefore, and to
repeat from our
copyright statement:
In return for copyright remaining
with the authors, and since the editors of ecjcs
work at no financial gain to themselves, all typographical errors and errors
of omission or fact that are contained in the text of articles, discussion
papers, conference and seminar papers, and reviews are the sole
responsibility of the author concerned.
Introduction
Reviewing Timothy Fitzgerald’s book The Ideology of Religious Studies
Shimada Katsumi (2001) is critical of Fitzgerald’s ideological arguments
which Shimada sees as being founded in a monolithic perception of how
scholars have analysed ‘religion’ over the centuries. Shimada in essence
argues that Fitzgerald does what he accuses other scholars of religion of
doing, i.e. reifying and essentialising categories in order to write about
them. Fleshing out this critique, Shimada argues that Fitzgerald’s work was
centred in ‘western nationalism’ and ‘cultural essentialism’ (p. 180 ).
Because of such orientations (which Shimada categorises as ‘naïve’),
Fitzgerald makes blanket statements about Japanese culture that are based,
Shimada complains, in a rigid Western/non-Western dichotomy that presents a
monolithic picture of Japanese culture that overlooks much, especially
Japanese, academic writing on the subject.
Moreover, Shimada states that Fitzgerald’s account fails to meet even basic
academic standards with regard to Japan in that, despite affirming an
anthropological perspective, Fitzgerald shows no evidence of using any
normative anthropological methods, such as participant observation,
fieldwork data, interviews or statistical surveys (p 180). It is not just a
seeming lack of empirical fieldwork data that Shimada complains of, for he
is also unhappy that Fitzgerald has not – at least according to the total
lack of citations in the book – consulted any Japanese language materials at
all. This, Shimada suggests, means that, while attacking research that has
been carried out in Japan on the topic of religion, he fails to demonstrate
any knowledge of what Japanese scholars have said on the subject and whether
their views might be similar to those of Western scholars. Thus, Shimada
argues, Fitzgerald’s comments simply fail to carry the persuasive power of
scholars who are well versed in the realities of research into Japanese
religions (p. 180). In fact, such are the problems with Fitzgerald’s
understanding of the topic and such are the academic deficiencies within it,
that Shimada thinks it would have been better if the section on Japan in
the book had been omitted.
Shimada’s review is pertinent in the context of Fitzgerald’s recent article
in the JAWS Newsletter (No. 35, 2002) now republished in slightly revised
form in here in the electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies,
because it identifies problems inherent in that article, which displays a
similar lack of evidence of normative anthropological modes of study and
data gathering, and a lack of awareness of what Japanese scholars have
written on the subject – and hence a seeming lack of recognition of the
extent to which this tallies with the accounts of scholars he criticises, or
of the extent to which the views of the western scholars he attacks might
have been influenced by Japanese scholarship. The article suffers, too, from
a variety of errors, including an obviously weak grasp of Japanese
historical and religious matters, poor referencing, and misrepresentations
of the work of others. It is also founded in a basic and rigid division
between the ‘West’ and ‘Japan’, that is simplistic and proves inadequate as
a mode of analysis.
I am not going to go through Fitzgerald’s article in great detail or
point out every mistake he makes, because this would involve a much longer
article than I or readers of this discussion could stand. I will note that
many of the errors, notably the appalling mistakes of spelling and grammar
that we scream about when our students make them (e.g. ‘there own exclusive
commitment’ , ‘it’s nearest Japanese approximation’), should have been
eradicated at the copy-editing stage. They are indicative, however, of the
article as a whole.
More serious than the many elementary grammatical mistakes that permeate the
article, are several factual and conceptual errors that illustrate the
poverty of Fitzgerald’s arguments. It is these that need some response and
correction, and here I will just focus on a few of the more obvious of them.
The first part of this article deals with Fitzgerald’s claim that the
categories of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ are alien to Japan and that they
have been invented and imposed on Japan from outside. The second will look
at some of the inventions and falsifications that he uses in his critique of
those he accuses of having imposed these categories onto the Japanese
situation, the third will briefly comment on his claims about ‘anthropology’
vis-à-vis other disciplines, and the final section will briefly comment on
the inadequacy of his proposal for an alternative category (‘ritual’) to be
used instead of ‘religion’.
The mythical invention of ‘religion’ in Meiji Japan
Central to Fitzgerald’s work is the claim is that the category ‘religion’ is
a particular Western colonial construction that has been exported to and
arbitrarily imposed – along with its partner in crime, the ‘secular’ – on
other cultures such as Japan. In the case of Japan his argument is that
Japan prior to Meiji made no distinctions between the ‘religious’ and the
‘non-religious’ – terms he uses synonymously with ‘religion’ and the
‘secular’. ‘Religion’ and its concomitants, the ‘secular’ or the
‘non-religious’ are terms that developed out of specific Western contexts
and are categories that do not work in the Japanese context, because they
come with a particular culturally weighted baggage and infer a ‘special,
set-apart’ category or realm that has no place or no basis in Japanese
cultural terms. Since there is no division between the ‘religious’ and the
‘non-religious’ these notions should be abandoned in favour of another
(Western-derived!) term, ‘ritual’.
Fitzgerald unfortunately produces no empirical evidence to substantiate his
claim that ‘religion’ as a category that stands apart in some way from the
‘non-religious’ or the ‘secular’ did not exist in pre-Meiji Japan. Rather,
he assumes that pre-Meiji Japan made no differentiation between the two,
asserts this point as if it were a given, and then moves on to state that
the category was therefore imposed in the Meiji era as a result of Western
influences. The argument is thus tautologous and rests on an unfounded
assumption. And, like all such arguments, it falls flat if – as is the case
here – the assumption on which it was based is incorrect.
Fitzgerald tells us that ‘religion’ and the concept of the ‘secular’ or the
‘non-religious’ were imposed on Japan in the Meiji because of ‘the
insistence by the western powers that a civilized society separates church
and state’. This is an extraordinary statement in the light of the fact that
the ‘western powers’ concerned with the transformation of Japan in the Meiji
era included European nations that did not adhere to the notion of
church-state separation. Does Fitzgerald really believe that Meiji-era
British diplomats, representing a state and serving a Queen who was Head
both of State and of a national church, thought that a civilised society
separates church and state? Did they perceive their own society as,
therefore, uncivilised? Or is Fitzgerald just telling us here how tenuous
his grasp of historical, to say nothing of political, issues is?
At the end of his article, too, Fitzgerald demonstrates his tendency to
think in monolithic categories and to make the error of glossing the
characteristics of one system onto a host of others, when he speaks of how:
‘the American written constitution with its separation of church and state
and its guarantee of religion satisfies the west that Japan is really just
like us, and conforms to our western assumptions about the world.’
Does he believe that we all think – or want to think – that Japan is ‘just
like us’? (Funnily enough, I had always thought one of the problems with
dealing with Japan has been the tendency to exoticise the place and make it
different, rather than seek to make it ‘just like us’…). Or, indeed, that
everyone in the ‘West’ operates on the same American-based constitutional
model? Such comments – and the factual problems within them – are indicative
of the general levels of accuracy (or lack thereof) in his work, and of the
tendency to operate through broad, reified generalisations rather than
through empirical data.
Fitzgerald provides no substance to his claim that certain distinctions and
concepts (e.g. ‘religion’ and the notion of ‘religion’ as a ‘set-apart’
sphere of existence) were imported at Meiji and must therefore be a Western,
colonial imposition. The problem here is that Fitzgerald appears to be only
minimally aware of Japanese history and religion1 when making such comments.
He fails to note, for example, that distinctions between the ‘religious’ and
the ‘non-religious’ have been a recurrent element in Japanese history since
at least the eighth century onwards. The Ritsuryō Codes of the eighth
century, for example, sought to develop a synthesis of politics, religion,
culture and state: the need to legally institute a synthesis itself
indicates that people at the time were aware that these elements occupied
different spheres of interest and hence needed some legislative process to
link them together for the sake of government. The Ritsuryō laws seeking
synthesis also recognised that these diverse elements had particular
interests which needed to be safeguarded and to have their integrity
preserved. Hence certain types of institutions (Buddhist temples and Shinto
shrines) were given particular rights because of their nature, related to
the worship of particular types of being and their association with other
realms, and were marked out legally and in tax terms as different from
institutions (e.g. feudal estates) that had mundane orientations. Equally,
those who served such institutions were seen as a special category of people
because of their ordinations as monks, nuns and shrine priests, and were
subject to different regulations to people in ordinary society2. The granting
of special tax concessions and status to institutions such as temples and
shrines that enshrined what Fitzgerald calls ‘mystical powers’ which pertain
not only to this but also to other realms, thus occurred even before the Heian era in Japan. While we are very much aware of the post-war laws that
have granted special status in tax and other terms to bodies legally
constituted as ‘religious organisations ’ (shūkyō hōjin), we should not
assume that the construction of such special status is either a post-war
innovation or a product of post-Meiji westernisation and the introduction of
new ‘set-apart’ categories. The notion that such forms of institution should
be differentiated from society and treated as a special category has been
around for a very long time in Japan. One notes, too, that the Ritsuryō
government also had a Department for Kami Affairs (Jingikan) which
indicates that, in the eyes of those who ran this system, matters relating
to these entities could be distinguished from other aspects of the realm and
placed in a special category to be administered by its own particular arm of
government.
Equally, after the Heian Court in the early ninth century permitted the
Tendai sect to establish its own ordination platform, Buddhist orders were
able to establish a form of self-governing authority that marked them out
from the rest of society. Indeed, the degree of autonomous power – including
the ability to maintain armies of monks – that Buddhist institutions wielded
was a notable feature of Japanese history until Oda Nobunaga’s destruction
of Mount Hiei in the sixteenth century. Such legal differentiations, and the
concept that certain types of order, institution and person, occupied
special categories related to their adherence to particular realms of
influence, are very much in evidence, too, in the continuing links and
struggles from the Heian until the early modern era between the concepts of
ōbō (also written as ōhō), Imperial law (i.e. law as generated by the state
and predicated upon state authority, needs and privileges) and buppō the
Buddhist Law (law predicated upon the religious orientations and claims of
Buddhism, and linked to the claims of privilege, special treatment and
priority made by those who claimed to represent the law of Buddhism in this
temporal sphere, i.e. the monks and their institutions). These two were
interrelated, and the ways in which one or other had the upper hand in the
relationship shifted from era to era. They were central, too, to Japanese
conceptualisations of the state and religion in pre-Meiji times. The two
operated in tandem, with worldly authority supporting and giving patronage
to Buddhist temples, while spiritual authority buppō represented by that
crucial component of the Buddhist world view, the sangha, the Buddhist
community of practitioners and institutions, gave moral and ritual support
to worldly authorities.
Yet if they existed in a mutually beneficial and interdependent
relationship, they were conceptualised as different entities. There were
spheres for the Emperor and state – and spheres for Buddhist institutions and
their specially defined community which, because they functioned under the
buppō and provided moral support for the state, were given privileges denied
other institutions. And because of this special status, too, Buddhist
priests were a class apart – indicated by their taking of the tonsure,
special vows and forms of dress that marked them out as different from, and
related to another world to, members of ordinary society. As late as the
Tokugawa era this difference was evident in the ways in which they were
subject to extremely severe punishments (not applicable to ordinary people)
if they violated the moral codes of the Buddhist law. (Here one might note,
too, since Fitzgerald seems so keen on close semantic analysis of words,
that a ‘religious’ is someone who is bound by monastic vows, while a
‘secular’ is a member of the laity, someone not bound by monastic vows – a
differentiation that is certainly found in Western cultures but that is also
in evidence in societies such as Japan, which also historically
differentiated in law and status between those bound or not by monastic
vows.)
The ōbō-buppō dyad, in other words, indicates a reality of pre-Meiji Japan:
that Japanese thought worlds conceived of and were well aware of a
differentiation between types of institution and areas of activity and
thought. As such, too, one could argue that formal attempts to separate
‘religion’ from the political in the Meiji era were driven as much, or more,
by the clear wish of the authorities to reduce or remove the influence of
the religious sphere in public life, as they were by any wish to ‘construct’
a special set-apart sphere called ‘religion’ to accord with western
sensitivities.
The conceptualisation of certain places as set apart from, or not really
belonging to this realm, but linked to a sacred realm, and usually
associated with gods or buddhas, also reinforces this view. Buddhist figures
of worship such as Kannon, for example, had their Pure Lands that were set
apart yet accessible from this realm (hence the tradition of monks who set
out from this physical world, leaving the shores of southern Kumano or
Shikoku to journey to Kannon’s Pure Land Fudaraku). Not only institutions
but particular places associated with deities and buddhas were considered as
standing apart from the ordinary world. Thus, there were prohibitions on
ordinary people entering particular mountain areas because these were
considered to be specially holy, and hence only to be entered by those who
had undergone certain initiations, or were members of religious orders, and
only for the purposes of worship and asceticism. These enforced separations
have largely disappeared since the promulgation of laws in the early Meiji
period stripped away such special prohibitions. As a result, indeed, one
could make out a case for saying that there may be even more of a blurring
of borders in some contexts nowadays between the religious and non-religious
than there was prior to the Meiji. For example, people can ascend mountains
such as Ontake as pilgrims and as adherents of a religious organisation or
they can go up as tourists with no intent to pray: the summits of places
once reserved for those engaged in special rituals now see tourists and
pilgrims side by side, each conducting their own activities in the same
space. This point – that in the modern day categories such as the ‘religious’
and the ‘secular’ may be blurred especially in areas such as pilgrimage – is
a running theme in much of my work on the subject - a point well noted by
other scholars in the field, even if it seems to have evaded Fitzgerald’s
understanding3.
It might be argued by some that these differentiations could be explained
via other vocabularies (e.g. sacred-profane or sei-zoku) and that we
do not need ‘religion’, the ‘secular’ and the ‘non-religious’ to identify
them. Yet this would be something akin to semantic juggling, not about the
existence or otherwise of differentiated categories, but about the terms
that might be used to apply to them. It would still create the same types of
category structures and set some things apart from others, and undermine the
basic assumption that no such differences existed pre-Meiji. It fails to
counter the basic point that in pre-Meiji Japan – as after – certain types
of institution, place, people and beings were distinct from (even if they
related to) the mundane world.
Even when he relies on the term shūkyō to substantiate his arguments,
Fitzgerald errs, appearing to think that the term did not exist prior to
Meiji, an assumption found in this article and expressed more overtly
elsewhere, where he claims that the term was invented in the 19th century,
‘specifically coined in the 1860s under foreign pressure’ (Fitzgerald 2003 p
222). This is wholly wrong and indicative of the problems in Fitzgerald’s
scholarship. I admit it is an assumption I might have helped create in my
statement (in Reader 1991a, p. 14) that shūkyō was a ‘derived word that came
into prominence’ at Meiji, and if so I apologise for causing confusion. This
statement is not quite correct, since it glosses over a long history. The
term shūkyō certainly is derived, but from Chinese Buddhist terminology,
first appearing in Chinese Buddhist texts, where it is used as a reference
term for Buddhism. In such contexts it came to Japan, where it appears, as
far as I am aware, for the first time in Japanese documents during the
Tempyō era (729-749), to indicate institutions that were accorded special
privileges because of their status in such terms. It crops up –admittedly in
specialised contexts, and in the writings of sectarian traditions, rather
than in popular discourse – throughout the next eleven centuries. In the Zen
tradition, for example, shūkyō was used to indicate Buddhist traditions
whose authority was based in textual transmission rather than (as Zen liked
to see itself) in direct personal transmission from an enlightened master.
In seventeenth century Tendai tracts, the term is used to identify specific
schools and traditions within the Pure Land sects, which are termed shūkyō.
These are but a few examples of the uses of the word pre-Meiji. All of them
point to a particular meaning that ties together the notions of an
organisation or institutional identity (shū – sect/school) and a set of
teachings (kyō) specific to it4.
Such a meaning is not far from (one might argue, it is rather close to)
nineteenth century notions of ‘religion’ as
something framed by doctrine and organisation. I suppose one could propose
an alternative word than ‘religion’ for translating or representing shūkyō
in such pre-Meiji writings, although I am not sure quite what that word
might be: maybe Fitzgerald could give us his opinion of how this term might
best be translated or interpreted in these pre-Meiji sources?
There are various other examples of how the word shūkyō
was used in
pre-Meiji times to indicate specific, separate, and doctrinally constructed
traditions and ways of teaching. Perhaps most strikingly, the term is used
by the eighteenth century thinker Tominaga Nakamoto (1715-1746) who used the
term shūkyō
to refer to specific, distinctive traditions in his 1745 tract
Shutsujo (Emerging From Meditation) (translated and edited by Michael Pye
(1990). Michael Pye has argued that Tominaga developed a critique of
‘religion’ and that his use of shūkyō
was ‘modern’ in context (by which he
means that it equates very much to Western concepts). In arguing that the
term shūkyō
‘meant none other than ‘religion’ as early as the first half of
the eighteenth century’, Pye states that ‘religion had already been the
object of sustained historical and systematic reflection’ well before
Western influences entered in the Meiji era and that, by the eighteenth
century:
‘two things are indisputable about the term shūkyō
….. it is a clear
equivalent for ‘religion’ as in the phrase ‘the study of religion’, and it
was not invented by westerners.’(Pye 1994 p 122).
Pye has subsequently emphasised the point further, stating that ‘the modern
study of religion(s) in Japan is influenced not only by reaction to western
models but also by underlying ideas available in the Japanese intellectual
tradition itself’ and that ‘The term ‘religion’ should by no means be
written off as a misleading western import ‘(Pye 2002 p 350-351).
Pye’s argument thus is that there is such conceptual and intellectual common
ground between shūkyō
and ‘religion’ that the one can relate to (and be
translated by) the other. Certainly, when Pye translates shūkyō
in Shutsujo
it is hard to see how he could have used any word other than the one he did
–
‘religion’– for this purpose. Thus, while one can accept that the English
word ‘religion’ came into Japan in the Meiji, the claim that ‘religion’ (in
terms of meaning) was imported then is incorrect. If Pye is correct, the
concept was there already. As such it is surprising that Fitzgerald has
virtually nothing to say about Pye’s work, which challenges the very
foundations on which his ‘case’ is built. In his original article, published
in the JAWS Newsletter to which this article was a response, Fitzgerald does
not mention Pye at all – a striking omission in the context. In his revised
version for this e-publication he has added a few comments in one footnote.
However, the ‘analysis’ of Pye proffered is unconvincing. Fitzgerald merely
notes that Pye’s arguments do not convince him (unsurprising, one might
consider, given the ideological bias Fitzgerald brings to the subject and
given that Pye’s work so effectively strips away so much of what Fitzgerald
claims!) . He states that Pye’s argument is ‘difficult to assess, partly
because it often isn’t clear what Japanese equivalents would be used in the
original Nakamoto texts’ – which merely indicates the problems with
Fitzgerald’s own approach. Of course, it would be clear to those who examine
the matter closely what terms are used by Tominaga; a scholar claiming
knowledge of the Japanese situation would certainly think of examining the
original Tominaga text, which is available in various libraries and
collections! Pye, moreover, provides examples of the terminology of
‘religion’, pointing out that Tominaga uses the term shūkyō. Why he has not
discussed Pye in the context of the evidence to hand, and has simply tried,
in an inaccurate footnote, to claim that he is not convinced by Pye, is one
that one can only speculate on, though the cynic in me asks whether he has
effectively ducked the issue because he has no real answer. Yet, without
properly discussing and refuting what Pye has to say, Fitzgerald’s case is
shorn of credibility and stands exposed as an assumption backed by no
evidence and built on hollow foundations. Perhaps Fitzgerald has some
argument he can provide to counter this point, but he certainly needs to
explain what pre-Meiji Japanese who used terms such as shūkyō
and accorded
special set-apart status to certain types of being and institution, meant by
such activities.
Thus, a basic cornerstone of Fitzgerald’s argument (that the notion that one
could separate out or differentiate between the ‘religious’ and the
‘non-religious’ was a Meiji invention imported from the west) is flawed. It
is far more accurate to state that the intellectual tools and concepts
relating to ‘religion’ as brought by Westerners in the nineteenth century
lent themselves to the adoption of the term shūkyō
in wider public discourse
because shūkyō
had a history that was associated with the types of concept
that were implied by the Western term ‘religion’. Indeed, it was because of
these meanings that the word was able to be assimilated into discourse with
Western missionaries and to be used as a standard translation of the
(nineteenth century) term ‘religion’.
Changing meanings and linguistic accuracy
This does not mean that shūkyō
as a term and concept has retained the same
meaning ever since – a point that George Tanabe and I make in our discussion
of shūkyō/religion (1998 p. 5). Yet, ironically for someone who makes great
play, in his references to one new set of meanings the ‘religion’ acquired
in the West in the 16th-17th centuries, about how terms can change in or
develop new meanings, Fitzgerald appears oblivious to the possibility that
this might happen also in Japan with shūkyō.
Yet any examination of this term
in Japanese contexts and in Japanese academic usage would indicate how its
meanings have developed and been broadened from its earlier narrow doctrinal
focus (see, for example, Reader and Tanabe 1998 pp. 3-7, and Shinno 1991,
passim, but esp. pp. 269-289). Quite why Fitzgerald fails to note this point
is unclear, although his failure to make any reference to Japanese language
scholarship in the article suggests possible clues5. If he had, he would have
noticed that, if ‘religion’ might have been culturally weighted in Meiji era
Japan in line with Western conceptions, it has, in its Japanese development
since then, acquired Japanese interpretations and cultural weightings that
have amended its meaning(s).
As readers of our book will know, it is, in effect, because of such changes
that Tanabe and I felt able to use the term ‘religion’. In defining what we
mean by this term we first warned readers of the ‘potential theological (and
culture-specific) implications’ it can hold (1998 p 4) but then moved on to
suggest that one can still use the term, as long as one qualifies it in ways
that get it out of its nineteenth century straitjacket and related it to
modern Japanese interpretations. In such contexts we discussed modern
Japanese academic concepts of shūkyō
and stated that, in using the term
‘religion’ we were effectively using an English translation of the Japanese
term shūkyō
(1998 p. 5).
Fitzgerald’s problems with Japanese terms do not end here. He comments, for
example, that the idea that genze riyaku ‘demarcates a religious rather than
a non-religious sphere of activity should be challenged’ and proceeds to
claim that one can receive riyaku from a ‘Boss’ as well as from (say) an
ancestor or some other ‘mystical being’. Yet the word riyaku itself
indicates the existence of a specific type of vocabulary in Japan, derived
from and related to Buddhism. Riyaku is a term originating in Buddhism and
relates to benefits emanating from divine (non-human) sources such as kami,
Buddhas, ancestors or other spiritual/mystical beings or powers. Definitions
in standard Japanese-English dictionaries (e.g. Kenkyûsha ) are clear on
this point, as are more specialist (e.g. Buddhist, Shinto) dictionaries.
There is also a ‘secular’ reading (rieki) of the same ideograms, which
denotes interest or benefits accrued in a material/financial sense from the
human world of business (and hence from Fitzgerald’s ‘Boss’). As such, using
the term riyaku to assert that one cannot differentiate between the
religious and non-religious is itself evidence of conceptual
misunderstandings.
A new method of academic criticism: Inventing statements you can criticise
If the above basic academic premise of Fitzgerald’s article is highly
dubious, so too is another aspect of it which attacks a number of scholars
(myself, Winston Davis, Byron Earhart and Neill McFarland) for their use of
the term ‘religion’ in Japan. The attack is dressed up as a seeming close
analysis of the words used by this ‘Gang of Four’, although, as will be
seen, there are times when what transpires is not so much close semantic
analysis as straight misrepresentation. According to Fitzgerald, the four
people mentioned (and I feel pleased to be associated with company such as
Davis and Earhart, whose work I cite, use in my teaching and find very
useful contributions to our understanding of the field) are part of what he
terms the ‘religion industry’ (p.59) that has used the (artificial, in his
view) religion-secular dichotomy to carve out a special ‘set-apart’ realm of
religion. Apparently, according to The Ideology of Religious Studies,
‘‘Religion’ has become constructed by some needs of a home audience and home
publishing industry’ (2000 p 211), and hence, it would appear, this
‘religion industry’ and the construct ‘religion’ itself, have been cobbled
together by Western publishers so they can sell books. (I am assuming that
‘home’ in this context relates to Western – or Anglo-American – audiences and
industry, since the scholars he criticises have all been published by
English and American publishers, and since he appears not to be aware of
Japanese studies of religion. He certainly makes no comment on the Japanese
situation, where the production of books on ‘religion’ – especially folk
religion – in Japan is bigger as an industry than it is in Western
languages.)
I do not question Fitzgerald’s view that publishers want to sell books
(after all, that is why they put snappy blurbs on dust jackets, and, indeed,
why they publish books in the first place!), nor that they have particular
interests and wishes for certain types of book that they think will sell.
This is not, however, enough to provide evidence of a collusion between
academics and publishers in the construction of an ideologically slanted
‘industry’. Indeed, one of the recurrent problems I – and, I suspect, most
academic authors – face, is that much of what we write is deemed not popular
enough to meet with the demands of ‘markets’ beyond our narrow academic
enclaves, and that getting books published on certain topics (and resisting
requests for others that appear to be ‘more commercial’) remains a struggle.
To show the problems that are caused by this ideological clique of
‘religionists’ (p.49), Fitzgerald goes through, with apparently close
textual analysis, some of the things that we say, thereby showing the errors
that arise from our tangled understandings. And I admit that if one were to take Fitzgerald’s work seriously one might come to the conclusion that we
have a few problems with our terms and concepts. I do not entirely disagree
with this, for we are talking about an area and set of terms that I find
genuinely problematic – an area, indeed, that some of us who write about it
have warned readers not to make Western-centric assumptions about (see, for
example, Earhart 1982 pp 192-193 as well as the warning made by Tanabe and
myself, referred to above).
Yet Fitzgerald consistently assumes that those who write about ‘religion’
all know what it is – even as he criticises scholars such as Davis for their
attempts to analyse it. (If Davis and others such as myself, really ‘knew’
just what it was, one might ask, why do we spend so long on definitions and
discussions of it?). Although Fitzgerald claims – although quite what
grounds he has for so doing is unclear – that I ‘know’ what religion is (he
means this in an ideological sense), the truth is far different. It is an
issue that remains puzzling for me – which is one major reason why I am so
interested in studying ‘religion’ and trying to work out what I think it
might be. (It is also, incidentally, one reason why one can identify
differences and changes that have entered my work over the years I have been
writing about the subject although, if one were to read Fitzgerald, one
might assume that I, and the other ‘religionists’ in the gang, have a
static, monolithic and unchanging view of the subject.6)
However, when one looks a little more closely at Fitzgerald’s ‘critique’
problems begin to appear – not least because Fitzgerald is frequently rather
economical with the truth. Put more bluntly, Fitzgerald builds a case based
in great part on the invention of quotations and the attribution – without
valid reason – of assumptions, terms and feelings to those he criticises,
which are then used as weapons of attack. I came to realise this when
reading his comments on my work – which at times had me saying in some
puzzlement, did I really use that phrase or say that? And when I checked,
more often than not, I did not. While it is certainly an interesting
academic technique to invent quotations and then use them as a means of
criticising someone’s work, it is neither sound nor academically honest.
That sounds a harsh comment to make, but in order to help readers of this
journal decide whether I am being unfair to Fitzgerald I will offer just a
few examples from his article.
Early in the article he makes the grand statement that:
“Reader may be unaware of the ideological legacy he has received from the
fathers of comparative religion”.
These ‘fathers’, according to Fitzgerald, include Max Muller, Rudolf Otto
and Mircea Eliade. How Fitzgerald ‘knows’ what ideological legacy I have
received, and from whom, and how he is able to proclaim that I am ‘unaware’
of it, are all matters of some speculation. He certainly is unaware that I
first encountered Otto as a postgraduate student, when I wrote an essay
criticising his notion of the numinous as a culturally bound idea based in
his privileged notion of Christianity and an implicit critique especially of
Islam. I doubt if he knows that I discuss Muller in MA seminars at Lancaster
in the context of nineteenth century Western ideological constructions and
imaginings of Buddhism, and am highly critical of Muller’s preoccupation
with text and the construction of idealised forms of ‘religion’7. Fitzgerald,
however, appears unconcerned about his lack of knowledge, making the
allegation/assumption without evidence, and ignoring any comments I might
have made to the contrary- such as the occasions when (e.g. Reader 1991b
Reader and Tanabe 1998 p. 4) I have made critical comments about the
orientations of the early academic study of religion. Fitzgerald, despite
his claims of having ‘trawled’ through my work (p. 53), manages to avoid
mentioning such critical comments – possibly, perhaps, because they do not
fit in with his allegations of my ideological roots.
Nevertheless, he follows this initial erroneous assertion by claiming that:
“Reader… seems to suppose without question that religion is a universal
phenomenon that has existed in all times and all places.”
Again, quite where this comes from is unclear. There are certainly no
citations provided to underpin this claim, although this is unsurprising –
for obvious reasons. I can only suggest that this is an invention of
Fitzgerald’s, conjured up to conform to his own prejudices.
Incidentally, given the stringent criticism implied in Fitzgerald’s words
above about the assumption of universal phenomena, it struck me as rather
ironic that he appears to deal in similar assertions himself. How otherwise
are we are to view such statements as ‘faith in reciprocity and reciprocal
dependency is fundamental to all societies in one way or another’ or even
his ‘Ritual is pervasive at every level of society, not least in Japan’?
Such sweeping value judgements leave one to wonder why certain types of
assumption about universality are acceptable, and others are apparently not.
Presumably the answer relates to where one’s prejudices lie: it appears that
the ‘universalising’ assumptions Fitzgerald has assigned, without due cause,
to me, are heinous sins whereas his own actual assumptions are perfectly
acceptable.
Perhaps I should not complain overmuch about Fitzgerald’s tendency to read
into my work assumptions about what I really feel. After all, he does the
same for Winston Davis who, on the basis of the three words ‘religion,
however defined’ in the midst of an extended discussion of theories, is
pronounced by Fitzgerald as being ‘weary of definitional problems’ – a point
serious readers of Davis’s work would find surprising. Then again,
Fitzgerald appears to like putting others in particular positions despite
any obvious indications to the contrary. Thus, Byron Earhart is included in
the ‘religion industry’ and tarnished by association with all those who
cling to universal assumptions about ‘religion’ – even though Earhart has
been one of the strongest voices warning us not to carry Western
preconceptions about ‘religion’ over into Japan contexts or to assume that
what goes on in Japan will necessarily be the same as one would find in
western contexts (e.g. Earhart 1982 pp. 192-193).
When Fitzgerald does actually move from making unqualified assertions, to
providing ‘actual’ quotations, the problems get even worse, since he appears
almost incapable of accuracy or getting hold of the right end of the stick.
He says, for example, that I have ‘pointed out that the idea of religion was
imported at Meiji’ (citing Reader 1991a pp. 13-14) when the point I made was
that the notion of religion as a ‘specific, belief-framed entity’ came into
prominence at this time (1991 p 13). That is not the same as saying that the
idea of ‘religion’ was ‘imported’ (and it certainly fits more closely with
the point I made earlier, about the pre-Meiji meanings of shūkyō
and why it
proved so suitable to use as a translation for ‘religion’). Fitzgerald here
also claims that I never consider that the arguments that this (i.e. the
concept of ‘religion’) ‘is a western myth, one that liberal ecumenical
missionaries have been importing to the rest of the world since the days of
Max Muller.’ Perhaps the point that I do not consider that this is a
‘western myth’ is because – as my earlier comments about pre-Meiji Japanese
concepts of shūkyō
indicate – this idea of a western import is itself a
fallacy, a myth constructed by those who have particular ideological
positions to emphasise and who appear unconcerned about the veracity of
their evidence.
He later complains that I ‘cannot explain the difference between a ritual
and a “religiously ritualized practice”’, and gives a page reference from
one of my articles to refer to this phrase in parentheses. I suspect that
most people reading this would assume therefore that I used the term
“religiously ritualized practice”. Yet when I checked the offending article
and looked at the page cited, the phrase was nowhere to be seen: nor does it
appear elsewhere in the article, which suggests that it must have somehow
come from Fitzgerald’s own mind. Might I suggest that the reason why I did
not explain the difference in the article is that I do not use the term!
Simple really.
Similar problems occur with his claim that:
“Reader …..distinguishes ‘between religious harmony and non-religious
harmony (1991:30) and even has a special set-apart place for “religious
sincerity” (1998)’.
If one checked these references out (the first refers, according to his list
of references, to Religion in Contemporary Japan, the second to my 1998
Short Introduction to Shinto) one would find something rather different. I
comment that harmony, which is affirmed as a social ideal in Japan, has also
been transformed into ‘something of a religious ideal’ (1991a p. 46). I do
not make a distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious harmony’ (nor
do I use the term ‘non-religious harmony’, which makes distinguishing it
from ‘religious harmony’ rather difficult!). The second claim, that I have a
special set-apart place for ‘religious sincerity’ is false. The term
‘religious sincerity’ does not occur in the work cited – so how could it have
a ‘special set-apart place’? In the Shinto book I discuss sincerity
and gratitude as qualities that are complementary and of importance in
Shinto thought (1998 pp. 97-99): I do not single out something called
‘religious sincerity’. The one occasion I have found where the term occurs
in my work is in Reader 1991, p. 16, in relation to the contents and ideals
advocated by Buddhist sects in the guidebooks they publish for their
followers, in which
Buddhists advocate sincerity as a core element in their value systems. There,
too, there is no ‘special set-apart place’ for it.
After such inventions, Fitzgerald claims that he has ‘trawled through’ my
work (if he had, he might at least have been able to provide a reference for
the use of the term ‘religious sincerity’!) but cannot find any editorial
principle that I have for including or excluding various forms of ritual
activity in my conceptualisation of religion (p.53). This is an illogical
statement, given that elsewhere Fitzgerald criticises me for having specific
modes of categorisation in which certain types of institution are privileged
and ‘set-apart’ as locations of the religious and in which he claims that I
consider rituals and values as religious “only when found in temples”. There
would appear (if Fitzgerald’s allegations are correct) to be some form of
editorial principle here. Fitzgerald, in effect, wants to have it both ways,
accusing me of (i) not having an editorial principle for excluding or
including ritual activities when discussing ‘religion’ and (ii) of having a
particular type of editorial principle in which I make distinctions relating
to specific (‘religious’ ) places such as temples, which form the basis of
including or excluding rituals within my framework of interpretation.
It is not just that Fitzgerald appears to be contradicting himself (I have
editorial principles that he does not like, but I do not have editorial
principles at all…) but that he has failed to read articles in which I have
set out some editorial principles. Fitzgerald clearly has not trawled
competently, or he might have come across them (e.g. Reader 1991b, whose
very title ‘What Constitutes Religious Activity?’– written in response to a
criticism that I disregarded belief and over-emphasised ritual performance!
–
gives a clue as to what it is about).
Fitzgerald claims that I repeatedly make a distinction between religious
rituals and those ‘that are merely secular’. One should not be too surprised
to note that he does not provide a reference to indicate where I might have
used the term ‘merely secular’ – again, for obvious reasons. Likewise, he
states that:
‘Reader sometimes identifies the “religious” with “the spiritual realm” and
contrasts it with the physical (1991: 46)’
and then moves on to say:
‘Presumably the “religious” is the non-material, what cannot be seen.’ (p.
66).
Thus he works out that I define the ‘religious’ as somehow being related to
the ‘non-material’, the unseen. The problems with this are manifold, not
least because, if readers care to check out the reference given (Reader
1991a p. 46) , they would find no such comments there, nor indeed comments
contrasting the ‘religious’ with the physical. They might also find it odd
to hear that I relate the ‘religious’ to the unseen and the non-material,
especially since much of my work has centred on the seen and on the study of
the material – the amulets, votive tablets and the material culture of
religion.
Even when he appears to find (partial) agreement with some of the things I
have written, Fitzgerald manages to mangle the ideas contained therein and
to indulge in further misinterpretation. Take, for example, his discussion
of my argument about the ‘primacy of action’ (Fitzgerald referring to Reader
1991a 15-20). For Fitzgerald this becomes an assertion of ‘ritual
prescriptions taking precedence over doctrine, belief, or individual
salvation.’. What I actually wrote focused on the ways in which practice
becomes a gateway to belief and comes prior to it in terms of attracting
potential followers (for example, to new religions) who are told to do the
practices and see what happened to them, rather being asked first to accept
and convert to a set of doctrines and beliefs. This does not mean that
action takes precedence over or is more important than belief (I do not know
any religious organisations in Japan which say that) but that it is an
avenue – very often the primary one – into faith and belief. The point of
emphasising this issue was to counter-act the dominance (at the time when I
wrote the book) of emphases about doctrine and belief that prevailed in much
of the field at the time, and trying to assert the importance of examining
practice.
Elsewhere, Fitzgerald takes an essay I wrote on cleaning rituals (Reader
1995), which suggested that there were problems in trying to sort out or
differentiate between rituals that occurred in religious contexts and in
‘apparently secular’ ones. The essay appears in a volume that Fitzgerald
praises early in his article because it ‘explicitly problematises the
religion-secular dichotomy and offers a powerful spectrum of ethnographies
on rituals’. Later in the article, however, Fitzgerald appears to
back-track, because suddenly one of the essays in this powerful spectrum of
ethnographies problematising the religion-secular dichotomy turns into
something entirely different, an emphatic and rigid affirmation of the
‘religion-secular’ division, that is somehow out of kilter with the rest of
the book (a point clearly not noticed by its editors).
Actually, it is not so much the essay that is out of kilter as it is
Fitzgerald’s interpretation of it. What I do in this essay is to raise
questions about the practice of cleaning and sweeping in a variety of
settings – focusing mostly on temples and new religions, but also in other
areas, so as to make the point that:
‘it is reasonable to raise the question of whether we can view all such
processes in which cleaning takes place in any ritualized form, from the
apparently secular occurrences of periodic community clean-ups to the
overtly religious discipline of samu in Zen temples, in a similar light.’
(Reader 1995 p. 241).
Perhaps this is more ambiguous than I thought when I wrote it, and when the
editor accepted it in a book that problematised the ‘religion-secular’
issue. To Fitzgerald this comes out as a statement asserting a distinction
between temple (i.e. religious) and other, e.g. community cleaning,
practices. Fitzgerald seems on one hand to recognise that I speak, in the
essay, of how practices that occur in different settings may have very
similar (or the same) themes, structures and meanings. Yet he then says that
this leaves the reader at a loss (actually – correction – it really leaves
only some readers at a loss) because of my seeming claim that the ‘secular’
and the ‘religious’ manifestations of these rituals differ. Actually,
nowhere in the essay do I make such a claim: I emphasise that some of the
rituals I talk about occur in ‘overtly religious settings’ (and there are
references to what these might be, including references to matters of legal
status) and others in ‘apparently secular’ situations. The ‘overt’ and the
‘apparent’ were intended to indicate the putative differences that some
might perceive (we are, after all, talking about different types of
institutions with different modes of intent as well as different legal
statuses, when we talk about temples and schools, for example) while the
tenor of the essay was to hint at practical and ritual similarities between
them. From this Fitzgerald somehow invents an intended difference and then
criticises me for not being able to explain it. Nor, despite his assertions,
do I make the claim that the values affirmed in spiritual training sessions
‘become specifically religious only when found in a temple’.
Fitzgerald also asserts, citing a quotation from the essay, that I make a
distinction between ‘overtly religious organisations’ and ethical or moral
welfare training ones (from which he extrapolates the idea, above, that I
claim practices are only specifically religious when they occur in a
temple). Unfortunately, the ‘quotation’ he produces is not what was written,
but an amended version of it constructed by Fitzgerald in a way cuts out one
vital phrase, replacing it (with no indication that it has been amended)
with a new word which he has inserted into the quotation. What is left out
is the phrase that indicates where distinctions might appear between
organisations that are legally registered as ‘religions’ in Japan, and those
that eschew such registration, but share similar characteristics. Fitzgerald
also ignores the citation I give at the end of the sentence he cites, and
which refers to the work of the Japanese scholar Numata Ken’ya, from whom
the notion was taken, and who has discussed how moral welfare and religious
organisations can be considered as part of similar categories of movement.
Incidentally, I should also note two further points, since Fitzgerald seems
so concerned about my use of the term ‘overtly religious organisation’. The
first is that the organisations discussed in the essay such as new religions
and Buddhist temples, have specifically chosen to affix this distinction or
label to themselves, and are legally registered as such (and as we have seen
earlier, such definitions are not just a product of the modern age).
Conversely, moral training organisations have eschewed the label for a
variety of reasons related to their own volition. There are thus two
distinct modes of registration that organisations with similar orientations
can make, as shūkyō hōjin, or as shuyō hōjin. The former are, in my view,
rightly termed ‘overtly religious’ in the Japanese context because they have
specifically chosen to claim that label by their legal registration.
The above comments suggest that, at the very least, Fitzgerald sometimes has
problems with his interpretation of the materials he cites. Sometimes – and
not just with the false ‘quotations’ – I wonder whether he has actually read
some of the things he criticises. This is shown by his comment when he
refers to Winston Davis’s:
‘exploration in chapter 2 of the concept of exchange, which earlier I
suggested might be usefully connected to genze riyaku in Reader and Tanabe’s
text.’
Leaving aside the small matter that earlier Fitzgerald had not said such a
thing – he had simply stated that genze riyaku is about exchange and
reciprocity – what is striking here is that Tanabe and I do discuss exchange
theory, drawing on Davis and Schutz and then proposing a modified form of
such theory (1998 p. 33 and Ch 4, passim ) in relation to riyaku and
relations with deities. Why, then, does Fitzgerald need to suggest that we
might usefully use a theory which we have used? Would it be unreasonable for
me to suggest that he does this because he has not read the text properly –
an assumption all too easy to make in the light of his demonstrated
inability to adhere to normative academic conventions such as getting one’s
quotations right?
Fitzgerald and other scholars
If Fitzgerald presents a selective misreading of my work, much the same is
true of his treatment of Davis, Earhart and McFarland. I will not comment
much here about his discussion of McFarland, save to note that, having
recognised that sectarian and doctrinally based organisations such as the
new religions could present him with problems since they appear to be areas
in which the concept of ‘religion’ might be applicable in modern Japan, he
then proceeds to argue for the reverse by a critical analysis of Mcfarland’s
(1967) book on new religions. Two things strike me in this. The first is
that the section on McFarland is virtually an exact replication of pp.
167-169 of The Ideology of Religious Studies – even down to repeating its
errors such as misspelling the name of the prominent sociologist of
religion, J. Milton Yinger, whom Fitzgerald in both places calls ‘Singer’!
One wonders about the academic propriety of copying one’s own work in this
way. The second is to ask why he needed to reproduce his earlier criticisms
of McFarland – whose work has been subject to widespread criticism over the
past two or so decades, and has long been regarded as problematic. Why, one
wonders, has Fitzgerald ducked an examination of more recent work on new
religions – whether by Western scholars such as Helen Hardacre or, indeed,
the other ‘gang’ members Earhart, Davis and myself (all of whom have written
books on new religions) or, indeed, the copious amount of work done by
Japanese scholars such as Shimazono Susumu and Inoue Nobutaka, to name but
two? Could it be that this would have been too problematic for him to do, in
that one can see – by comparing the work of Western and Japanese scholars who
have written on this subject8 – that there are many areas of similarity
between them, and that the new religions, as discussed in contemporary
writings on the subject, too readily fit into the category structures that
Fitzgerald abhors and seeks to deny exist in Japan? Shimada’s criticism –
that Fitzgerald appears unaware of Japanese scholarship and hence seems not
to know that Japanese scholars work with similar concepts to Western ones –
appears valid here.
When Fitzgerald discusses other scholars, too, he continues to manifest his
inability to provide adequate referencing. His very brief section on Byron
Earhart, whose distinguished career of writing about religion in Japan
(several books and many articles and translations) is a mere half-page
ridiculously titled ‘Byron Earhart’s contribution’. This says nothing about
Earhart’s extensive contribution to the field, instead citing just one
quotation from Earhart’s extended oeuvre, referenced as ‘Earhart 1984’– a
title that appears nowhere in Fitzgerald’s list of references. The only
reference to Earhart in his bibliography does not contain the quotation.
This one sentence is used to back his insistence that Earhart is here using
“the western ideologically determined slots ‘religion’ and ‘society’”. He
fails to tell readers what I have already pointed out above about Earhart:
that he has specifically warned his readers against using Western
conceptualisations of ‘religion’ in the Japanese context – a warning that
would seem to go against Fitzgerald’s claims of Earhart’s ideological bias.
He then goes on to say that Earhart’s treatment of the ancestors strengthens
the point he (Fitzgerald) wishes to make, yet he fails to give any reference
to this apparent treatment, leaving interested (or doubting) readers unable
to check for themselves whether Earhart actually does this.
His comments on Davis are also problematic. I have noted earlier how without
adequate evidence, he has described Davis as being ‘weary of definitions’.
He also glosses Davis’s citation of Yanagita Kunio’s well-known complaints
about the ‘decline’ of folk religion because of Meiji modernisation, so that
it becomes a critique of Davis. Thus we find Fitzgerald complaining that
Davis does not explain why ryōkan are ‘secular’ when, in fact, it is
Yanagita who uses such terms, and Davis who cites them as examples of
Yanagita’s critiques of modernity!
Fitzgerald is expressly critical of both Davis and myself for considering
the Japanese to be ‘fundamentally mistaken about their own behaviour’ and
because we:
‘know exactly what ‘religion’, ‘religious activity’ and ‘religious
behaviour’ is (sic), but the Japanese do not.’
Even a story I used to indicate the misguided presuppositions I had when I
first arrived in Japan, about how I thought people might act when they
visited shrines and temples, is used to suggest that I continued to hold
these views even after doing research in Japan. (Somehow Fitzgerald
overlooks the fact that I pointed out (1991a, p. 2) that I was naïve in this
context at the time).
Actually, neither Davis nor I tell our readers that ‘we know’ what religion
is but the Japanese do not. I do not even, despite Fitzgerald’s claim, at
any stage tell readers that to be religious, things must be done in a
‘worshipful’ manner. In criticising the lines that Davis and I take,
Fitzgerald actually exposes the fundamental problem of his lack of awareness
of the ways in which Japanese scholars of religion, notably sociologists of
religion, have analysed data and dealt with issues that they relate to
‘religion’ (shūkyō). (If he wishes to get some insight into these points
and does not want to read through copious amounts of Japanese, he might
start with Reader 1990 or Inoue (ed) 1995, esp. Inoue’s Introduction pp.
4-17).
Perhaps it is because of this lack of awareness that he is unable to
understand that both Davis and I are commenting on the problems that can be
caused by terms such as ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ in Japanese contexts,
especially when they are tied to questions of belief. My point here (as in
much of my work) has been to emphasise the importance of examining practice
as a critical element in the study of (what I call and have in various
places defined as) religion. This is rather different from the
philological-doctrinal-textual orientations of ‘founding fathers’ such as
Muller from whom (according to Fitzgerald) I have imbibed so much – although
it does not mean that (pace Fitzgerald) I necessarily consider practice to
be more important than (say) belief or doctrine. Davis, too, is aware of the
semantic problems concerned with terms such as ‘religion’ and is also aware
of how Japanese scholarship has looked at such problems, and what sorts of
things it has included in the rubric of things that it wishes to place in
this category.
It is certainly interesting to note, in this context, that Fitzgerald
appears unaware of the intellectual debt owed by those he criticises, to
Japanese scholarship. Rather than imposing Western ideological assumptions
on the Japanese, one could argue that the work of Earhart and myself in
particular has been heavily influenced by Japanese colleagues in how we
interpret and understand ‘religion’ in Japanese contexts. I make this clear
in a number of places (e.g. Reader 1991a: viii, Reader and Tanabe 1998 pp.
4-6), and in my discussions of the types of data and issues I examine in
Religion in Contemporary Japan that I use many of the same forms of data and
information that sociologists of religion in Japan were working with in the
1980s. One can see, too, in Earhart’s work, the extent to which he has been
influenced by Japanese scholars- notably his colleague Miyake Hitoshi.
Nonetheless, we are accused of claiming that we somehow ‘know’ what the
Japanese do not know, and that we know what the Japanese really think – even
if the parameters we use for our interpretations, and the forms of data we
use, are quite normative in Japanese sociology of religion. I should also
note that when I (the same is true for Davis and Earhart) make statements
about aspects of Japanese behaviour, attitudes and so on, it is done after a
fair amount of cross-referencing. Like Davis and Earhart, I use a
multiplicity of sources together, from fieldwork and Japanese academic
writings, to popular publications, to surveys and quantitative data. To that
extent we could argue that whatever claimed ‘knowledge’ we put forward, is
at least substantiated in terms of data.
One might contrast this with Fitzgerald’s own approach. He also appears to
‘know’ what the Japanese really think, as one can tell from his repeated
generalisations (e.g. ‘the things that are important to the Japanese
collectively themselves’, or the extraordinary suggestion (from his book)
that ‘for Japanese people non-Japanese are not fully human.’ (2000, p. 183).
Fitzgerald provides no data or evidence (not even surveys in which the
Japanese people say what is important to them) to back such statements up:
he apparently ‘knows’ these things without needing to provide evidence to
substantiate them. As with his tendency towards universalising comments
cited earlier, here, too, he appears to criticise others for doing what he
himself does with abandon.
The mystical insights of anthropologists and the impoverished world of
sociologists
Underlying the article is an ideological bias based in Fitzgerald’s claim to
belong to a somehow privileged academic category called ‘anthropologists’
who, according to his grand claims, are:
‘less likely to become submerged by conceptual problems that the category
typically induces than are those from religious studies. This is because
anthropologists tend to have a more sophisticated grasp of the ethnocentric
bias of categories and a greater range of alternatives through which to
lessen the perhaps inevitable distortion that occurs when the concepts of
one culture are used to describe and explain another.’
No empirical evidence is produced to substantiate this grand pronouncement.
Indeed, one is left to wonder precisely what it is that marks
anthropologists out in the ‘sophistication’ stakes: judging by Fitzgerald’s
article, one would conclude that what marks anthropologists out is a poor
grasp of historical issues and an inability to replicate even basic
quotations or cite any anthropological data. Fitzgerald certainly appears
unable to recognise that one of the most important means through which to
really understand the ethnocentric bias of categories is through close
linguistic awareness of the cultures one studies – and that this is an
important means through which to understand that no one category is exactly
the same across cultures and that no culture is ‘just’ like another. And as
I have already noted, there are questions about Fitzgerald’s linguistic
interpretation of terms such as shūkyō
and riyaku. But there we have it:
somehow anthropologists seem blessed with some special nature that makes
them see into the parts of culture that other disciplines cannot reach.
Having introduced the mystical qualities of anthropologists, Fitzgerald
provides a rather fascinating analytical device for ‘explaining’ why
problems occur in the writings of people such as Davis, Earhart and myself.
We are, it appears, located in the sociological tradition! Indeed,
displaying the levels of academic inaccuracy that permeate the article, he
even calls my friend George Tanabe a ‘sociologist’ – an interesting
description of someone widely known as a historian and specialist on
medieval Buddhist thought, art and texts. Still, in the light of
Fitzgerald’s general economies with the truth, this is not too great a
howler: I imagine for those lucky enough to be blessed with the superior
insights of anthropology, all lesser fields and beings – sociologists,
historians and so on – are all pretty much the same.
This lauding of anthropologists for their innate insight might be an
ingratiating tactic for someone seeking to get an article accepted by an
anthropology newsletter, but it hardly provides an adequate analysis of the
differing qualities of academic disciplines. Nor does it provide any sound
basis for Fitzgerald’s discussion of other scholars, in which the bias
inherent in the above comment comes to the fore. Thus, Jan van Bremen is
praised for his perceptive understandings of the problems caused by
categories such as religion and the secular, and his Introduction (1995) to
the aforementioned edited book on rituals in Japan, is cited positively in
this respect. Yet no mention is made of the fact that van Bremen uses terms
(e.g. ‘religious rites’, ‘religious institutions’, ‘religious ideas’ and
‘religious practices’) without qualification, just as do the ‘sociologists’
(e.g. Reader, Davis) with whom Fitzgerald finds such fault. Yet what, in
Fitzgerald’s view, are imposed Western category mistakes when used by
‘sociologists’ appear not to be a problem when used by an anthropologist.
Obviously the special mystical insights of the anthropological realms are at
work behind the scenes here: unfortunately, since I am not an
anthropologist, I am unable to see them and am hence left bemused.
Moreover, when one examines the examples and assertions Fitzgerald makes,
one is left with scant knowledge of how much he has applied his apparent
affiliation to the anthropological brother- and sister-hood. The apparent
lack of fieldwork in The Ideology of Religious Studies of which Shimada
complains, is inherent also in the JAWS Newsletter article. While we have
many assertions (such as the apparent similarity in perception between
ancestors and the ‘Boss’), there is little empirical data cited to indicate,
for instance, any fieldwork investigations, interviews, studies of
particular communities or particular types of people who provided data for
such perceptions. All I could find was a reference to Fitzgerald getting
loaded on sake at weddings and drawing, from this, feelings of communitas
and the collapsing of boundaries. (Does this make me an anthropologist,
given that I, too, have had my share of entering into sublimely perceptive
states using similar means? Or am I just betraying my imperceptive
sociological self by not basing my work on sake-fuelled sensations?).
While these comments may sound cynical, they indicate a serious problem with
Fitzgerald’s work and his claims of anthropological insight. If one is to
claim special status for certain types of academic methodology, one needs to
demonstrate that one has used such methods successfully, and present
evidence (e.g. in the form of data) to show it has worked. As far as his
article indicates, Fitzgerald is unable to substantiate his claims in
empirical terms. Indeed, in his lack of empirical material and lack of
demonstrable fieldwork evidence, I would – linking back to Shimada’s
criticisms about Fitzgerald’s lack of fieldwork evidence and Japanese
citations – suggest that what Fitzgerald is doing is very much in the sort
of ‘colonialist’ mode he accuses others of following. Without apparent
recourse to empirical evidence, and without looking at what Japanese
scholars have said, Fitzgerald appears ready to pronounce on the ‘Japanese’
and to assert what ‘they’ feel. I cannot think of a more colonialist – or in
Shimada’s terms, ‘western nationalist’ – perspective than this.
Religion and ritual
The intention of this response has not been so much to deal with
Fitzgerald’s charge that scholars including myself are using a category
(‘religion’) that fails to provide a viable or useful analytical tool for
studying matters Japanese, as it has been to demonstrate the fundamental
problems with his own article, as a chimera based in misunderstandings,
misinterpretations and the imposition of categories. I will, however, finish
with a few comments about the term ‘religion’ which, as I have recognised,
is problematic – although not just in Japan. That is why scholars in
Religious Studies are constantly discussing and arguing about the term and
its modes of application: recent Department seminars at Lancaster, presented
by departmental colleagues, have resulted in raging debates and disputes
over these issues – and long, in my view, may we remain in dispute.
Fitzgerald is misguided if he thinks Religious Studies is really so
monolithic that it adheres to a set of creeds set out by some ‘founding
fathers’ many decades back: debates continue in Japanese as well as Western
languages about the terms and meanings we use.
The terms ‘religion’ and shūkyō
are not static, and, as such, they offer
grounds both for continuing (re)interpretation and for cross-cultural study.
As any student of ‘religion’ knows, the term – and the field of study it
implies – have changed greatly since the nineteenth century: Religious
Studies departments do not spend their time just studying texts and
doctrinal systems and nowadays they even hire people like me, who mostly
write about things such as pilgrimages, amulets and prayers for worldly
benefits. These changes will continue, too, and they will continue through
what I see largely as a process of understanding and modifying the terms we
use as we enhance our studies. The changes in meaning that shūkyō
has
acquired since Zen Buddhists in medieval Japan used it to refer to
text-based teaching traditions, and especially since academic studies of
shūkyōgaku have proceeded in late twentieth century Japan, are ample
evidence of this.
Using terminology that allows for some cross-cultural understanding and
sharing of phenomena is also vital – and here, too, a notion of ‘religion’
that has been liberated from its nineteenth century protestant straitjacket
and that incorporates practice as well as doctrine, and individual motives
as well as group dynamics, provides a useful mode of analysis. That is why
there has been such a strong drive among Japanese scholars studying what we
tend to call ‘folk religion’ (nowadays most commonly termed in Japanese minzoku shūkyō) towards using the term shūkyō, which they see as affording
grounds for drawing Japanese studies out of isolation and allowing for some
common ground of discussion with other cultures and traditions (see e.g.
Miyake 1989 and Shinno 1991; for fuller discussion of these issues see
Reader (unpublished/in press).
At the end of the day we have to operate with terms and categories that
allow us to work across cultures. This is not so that we can persuade
ourselves that other cultures are just like ours or impose our own
categories on them, but to enable us to have at least some form of a common
language that allows us to talk together and draw from different cultures in
theoretical terms while recognising the special nature of each culture.
(Thus, in my book on the Shikoku pilgrimage (Reader, in press) I can both
highlight its striking particularities and use it as a means of making
broader comments about ‘pilgrimage’ in more general terms). The alternative
is to adopt the sort of approach that claims one cannot examine or
understand any culture or issue save in the context of its own cultural
parameters and in isolation. (In effect, that is what I fear Fitzgerald ends
up by doing: positing a Japan so ‘alien’, so ’different’, so ‘exotic’ (after
all, they don’t regard anyone else as fully human do they?) that one cannot
begin to examine them using any viable terminology that relates to the
‘West’. This, again, is where the rigid Western/non-Western dichotomy that
Shimada complains of in Fitzgerald’s work, is evident. The logical extension
of this is that, if we are to dismiss certain words and concepts because
they are culturally bound, why use others (e.g. ritual) that also carry
cultural baggage?
One answer might be to only write about Japanese topics in Japanese, thereby
avoiding any potential terminological clashes. There are areas (e.g.
discussing typologies of pilgrimage) where this might be easier to do, due
to the differing complexity of Japanese as opposed to English terminology in
this area) but overall it appears an impractical solution. Not only would it
severely restrict the study of other cultures and make it hard to teach them
to students who do not have the appropriate language skills, but it would
reinforce the notion of exoticism without gaining any understanding of
difference.
The alternative is to recognise the problems with terms, and use them
accordingly, through constantly testing them, revising what we mean by them,
and bearing in mind how other scholars- notably Japanese colleagues – frame
their definitions and use their terms. When one translates (e.g. from
Japanese to English), one inevitably encounters problems of interpretation.
One also comes to recognise that certain terms play across the linguistic
divide – and I would suggest that shūkyō
and religion do this. They did so in
pre-Meiji times, made a reasonable fit for each other in the terminology of
the Meiji era, and have complemented each other in their developments since
then.
For Fitzgerald, however, religion-shūkyō
does not work, and he wants to
provide an alternative term for analytical use, and he suggests it is one
that cuts across divisions and that demonstrates the uselessness of the
‘religion-secular’ divide. The insistence that there is no such ‘thing’ as
‘religion’ or the ‘secular’ is of course every bit as ideological a premise
as is the claim that there is, but no matter. For Fitzgerald, the terms must
be thrown out, and replaced by ‘ritual’, and he argues that pretty much
everything we need to know about Japan can be interpreted through this
notion. Taking things further, he even suggests (again, displaying his
innate knowledge of what I really want!) that:
“most of what Reader means by ‘religion’ is the performance of rituals, and
it is unclear what else over and above ritual he really wants to talk
about.’
Unsurprisingly, I disagree. While ritual is a useful category for analysing
certain forms of action (and, as I have demonstrated, cleaning floors can be
interpreted as a ritual that occurs across any divide between the religious
and the secular), it has its own failings that are at least as conceptually
ensnaring as, for example, ‘religion’. This is evident in the things I have
written about that cannot, in my view, be subsumed within or interpreted by
‘ritual’, such as personal volition (e.g. in purchasing amulets and votive
tablets – how does one include the multiplicity of individual feelings found
there within a general framework of ‘ritual’?); the importance of belief and
doctrine (which, as I have shown with regard to Aum (Reader 2000) can be a
very significant issue indeed, and which I do not see as being adequately
handled under the rubric of ‘ritual’); and much else. Nor, in my most recent
book in press, do I find ‘ritual’ a very useful category for analysing
pilgrimage: while some aspects of pilgrimage lend themselves to analyses
using concepts of ritual process, much that is included in my study of
pilgrimage (e.g. the imagining of landscape, the questions of individual
experience central to the ways in which pilgrims understand their own
journeys, the ways in which pilgrims within the same group travelling
together can record very different narratives and understandings of what
they have done) cannot be adequately discussed or understood through such
terms.
While ‘ritual’ as a category allows for the recognition of common ground
between ritual practices in (say) a school or company and in a temple, it
also may not accord us the potential for differentiating between practices.
Nor, I would argue, does it allow for scope in identifying individual
volition or personal motivations – issues which can at least be deciphered
within the terminological rubric of ‘religion’. My concern with ‘ritual’ is
that it tends towards generalisations and lumping together of all
participants into a single framework or grouping of categories. We can see
this, in effect, in Fitzgerald’s blanket comments about ‘the Japanese’ when
they are performing ritual acts relating to relations between ancestors and
the living, and the living and their bosses: when the ritual process of
giving and receiving becomes paramount, we are in danger of losing sight of
the potential within ritual performances for shades of opinion and
differentiation to occur. What we end up with is ‘the Japanese’ all
performing the same acts and becoming somehow the ‘same’. We would end up
making the same mistakes as did the nineteenth century scholars who, in
thinking ‘religion’ was all about doctrine and text, and allowing no room
for ritual and practice, reduced and ultimately impoverished the field they
were trying to study: by reducing everything to ‘ritual’ we would be equally
impoverishing the field of study and – mirroring the folly of the early
‘fathers’ who ignored practice – be closing the door to much that was
relevant.
We cannot even find, through ritual analysis, why certain people might join
one Japanese new religion, and others join another: they are just all
engaged in ritual practices that go across any dividing lines, and we have
no further scope for analysing why they might follow (or disregard) certain
types of practice rather than others. At least within problematic terms and
category concepts such as religion, one finds scope for analysing why
certain people join certain new religions (and not others) and why they
might join none at all. While ritual is a useful category for helping
analyse certain types of performance, it is not adequate to cover the sorts
of areas I am most interested in studying and writing about – and it fails to
provide the means through which one can adequately discuss and account for
some of the things that one finds in ‘religion’, such as concepts of truth,
personal faith, belief, doctrine and much else.
The category and term – especially when one understands what is meant by it
in its different (English-Japanese) forms – also allows for some common
ground in discussions with colleagues in Japan and elsewhere. Thus, in
discussing, for example, notions such as ‘new religions’ or shin shūkyō
with
Japanese colleagues, we have been able to understand what each of us is
talking about. In footnote 7 (above), I refer to books published by myself
and a Japanese colleague on Aum, and note that they are quite similar in
terms of conceptualising the field of study. I should also note that our
interpretations of the topic also were much assisted by many discussions
together on it, which were facilitated by a shared understanding of terms
such as shūkyō
and shin shūkyō. Equally, in the 1980s when I worked with
colleagues in the Shūkyō Shakaigaku no Kai who were discussing what they
meant by shūkyō, I was able to find enough shared ground to make discussion
viable. I am not convinced that we were all falling into the same ‘category
mistake’, nor that jettisoning the terms ‘religion/shūkyō’ would have
enhanced our conversations and interactions in any way: I think that the
reverse is more likely to happen, without any gain or advances in our
theoretical understandings.
We will gain little if nothing from supplanting ‘religion’ with ‘ritual’ –
and we run the risk of severely limiting the potential we have for
analytical cross-cultural understanding. And until Fitzgerald can provide an
adequate academic argument – one that is based in empirical materials, is
grounded only in real references, and that takes note of scholarly studies
of Japan from all quarters (by which I mean, that shows appropriate respect
for Japanese scholarship to accord it some consideration in his discussions)
– I will remain unconvinced by his arguments, and swayed more by Shimada’s
assessment of his work.
Notes
1. I note that, in this response I am going to
use the word ‘religion’ not only because I remain unconvinced by
Fitzgerald’s arguments about its lack of applicability, but also because it
appears to me to be a useful term to relate to both to pre-modern
institutions such as temples and Buddhism, and to the modern uses of
shūkyō.
2. See Teeuwen and Scheid 2002 p 199, and also
Kitagawa 1987 pp. 87-90.
3. See, for example, John Eade who, in a study
of theoretical works on pilgrimage, highlights my work as having
‘challenge(d) the rigid separation between the sacred and the secular’ (Eade
2000 p.xvi).
4. For information on these points and on
various uses and textual occurrences of shūkyō, including those
mentioned above, one can consult numerous standard dictionaries such as the
Kokugo Daijiten (1976 Vol 10, p 238), the Jidai betsu kokugo
daijiten (Muromachi jidai edition) 1994 p 466, the Kadokawa kogo
daijiten Vol 3 p 265, and Nakamura Hajime’s (ed.) Bukkyō daijiten
(1989/2000) pp. 391-392. Any search of standard historical and other
dictionaries would provide similar examples of this term. Given the ready
availability of such information, I find it extraordinary that Fitzgerald
can make such erroneous claims and appear so confused over the uses and
historical nature of this term. It almost leads one to question his
competence as a scholar of things Japanese, even as he appears to claim the
mantle by engaging in linguistic arguments about Japanese terms.
5. In the revised version on this site
Fitzgerald has added a reference to an article by Isomae Jun’ichi (albeit
with incomplete referencing, since the entry includes no pagination and
fails to provide the exact reference for materials he claims are in that
article).
6. As I noted in Reader 2000, for example, I
now pay far more attention and give greater weight to text and doctrine than
I did ten or so years back. This change of position (welcomed with great
amusement by some of my friends in the Buddhist Studies area) has come
through my studies of Aum, which showed me just how potent the notion of
ideology and doctrine can be. This, again, is something that cannot be
explained by limited notions such as ‘ritual’.
7. One might note, too, that Muller was deeply
concerned with constructing an idealised vision of Asian traditions such as
Hinduism through textual interpretation and famously told his students not
to go to India, where the reality of Hindu practice might shatter their
visions of what ‘pure’ Hinduism was. There is somewhat of a difference here
with my own approach, which seeks to construct understandings primarily out
of fieldwork and engagement with practice, and which encourages fieldwork.
This point alone would seem to indicate that whatever ideological legacy I
have it is not one that comes from Muller.
8. One might compare, for example, Shimazono
1997 and Reader 2000 as examples of studies of Aum that both locate it
within the wider tradition of Japanese new religions, and that (one in
Japanese, the other in English) use similar terminology and modes of
analysis. While there are differences in focus (Shimazono focuses less on
structural issues in terms of Aum than I do, and I pay less attention to the
provenance of Aum’s teachings than he does) we share much common ground in
analysing Aum and in emphasising the doctrinal issues that were so central
to it.
References Cited
Dictionaries
Bukkyō daijiten (ed. Nakamura Hajime et. al.) 2000 (1st edition 1989)
(Iwanami Shoten)
Kadokawa kogo daijiten (ed. Nakamura Yoshihiko et. al. ) 1982 (Kadokawa
Shoten)
Kokugo daijiten (ed. Nihon Daijiten Kankōkai) 1976 (1st ed. 1972)
(Shōgakkan)
Muromachi jidai hen (Muromachi era volume of the Jidai Betsu Kokugo Daijiten) 1994, (ed. Muromachi Jidai Jiten
Henshū Iinkai)
Other Works
Eade, John 2000 New Introduction. In John Eade and Michael Sallnow
Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (Urbana,
Ill: Illinois University Press) pp.ix-xxvii
Earhart, H. Byron 1982 Japanese Religion: Unity and Diversity (Belmont,
Cal.: Wadsworth)
Fitzgerald, Timothy 2000 The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Fitzgerald, Timothy 2002 ‘Religion’ and the ‘Secular’ in Japan: Problems in
History, Social Anthropology and the Study of Religion. JAWS Newsletter No.
35, pp. 44-76.
Fitzgerald, Timothy 2003 Playing Language Games and Performing Rituals:
Religious Studies as Ideological State Apparatus. Method and Theory in the
Study of Religion Vol. 15/3 pp. 209-254.
Inoue Nobutaka (ed) 1995 Gendai Nihon no shūkyō shakaigaku (Tokyo: Sekai
Shisōsha)
Kitagawa, Joseph M. 1987 On Understanding Japanese Religion (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press)
McFarland, H. Neill 1967 The Rush Hour of the Gods: A Study of New Religious
Movements in Japan (New York: Macmillan)
Miyake Hitoshi 1989 Shūkyō minzokugaku (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppan)
Pye, Michael 1994 What is ‘Religion’ in East Asia? In Ugo Bianchi (ed.)
The
Notion of ‘Religion’ in Comparative Research: Selected Proceedings of the
XV1th Congress of the International Association of the History of Religions
(Rome 1990) (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider) pp. 115-122.
Pye, Michael 2002 Modern Japan and the Science of Religion. In Gerard A. Wiegers and Jan G. Platvoet (eds)
Modern Societies and the Science of
Religions (Leiden: Brill) pp. 350-376.
Pye, Michael (trans with Introduction) 1990 Emerging from Meditation (by Tominaga Nakamoto) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press)
Reader, Ian 1990 Returning to Respectability: A Religious Revival in Japan?
Japan Forum 2/1, pp. 57-68.
Reader, Ian 1991a Religion in Contemporary Japan (Basingstoke and Honolulu:
Macmillan and University of Hawaii Press)
Reader, Ian 1991b What Constitutes Religious Activity? Japanese Journal of
Religious Studies 18/ 4, pp. 373-376.
Reader, Ian 1995 Cleaning floors and sweeping the mind: Cleaning as a ritual
process. In Jan van Bremen and D.P. Martinez Ceremony and Ritual in Japan:
religious practices in an industrialized society (London: Routledge) pp.
227-245.
Reader, Ian 1998 Simple Guide to Shinto: The Religion of Japan (Folkestone:
Global Books)
Reader, Ian and Tanabe, George J, Jr. 1998 Practially Religious: Worldly
Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan (Honolulu, Hi, University of
Hawaii Press)
Reader, Ian and Tony Walter (eds) 1993 Pilgrimage in Popular Culture
(Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan)
Reader, Ian 2000 Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum
Shinrikyō (Richmond, UK and Honolulu, USA: Curzon and University of Hawaii
Press)
Reader, Ian (in press) Folk Religion in Japan. In Clark Chilson,
Robert Kisala, Okuyama Michiaki and Paul L. Swanson (eds.) The Nanzan Guide
to Japanese Religions (Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for Religious and
Culture: in press)
Reader, Ian (in press) Making Pilgrimages, Making Meanings: Landscape and
Practice in the Shikoku henro (University of Hawaii Press: in press)
Shimada Katsumi 2001 Review (in Japanese) of Timothy Fitzgerald The Ideology
of Religious Studies. Shūkyō Kenkyū Vol. 75/1 (No. 328) pp. 175-181
Shimazono, Susumu 1997 Gendai Shūkyō no kanōsei: Oumu Shinrikyō to bōryoku
(Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten)
Shinno Toshikazu 1991 Nihon yugyō shūkyōron (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan)
Teeuwen, Mark, and Bernhard Scheid 2002 Tracing Shinto in the History of
Kami Worship: Editors' Introduction. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies
Vol. 29/3-4, pp. 195–207.
van Bremen, Jan 1995 Introduction: The Myth of the Secularization of
industrialized Societies. In Jan van Bremen and D.P. Martinez Ceremony and
Ritual in Japan: religious practices in an industrialized society (London: Routledge) pp. 1-12.
About the author
Ian Reader is Professor in Religious Studies at
Lancaster University. His first degree
was in History at the University of Reading,
followed by several years of travelling in Asia, Africa and North and
Central America, before doing an MA on religion in Africa at
Bristol University, and a PhD at
Leeds University on the Sōtō Zen
Buddhist organisation in Japan. He taught for five years at Japanese
universities before working at the Scottish Centre for Japanese Studies at
the University of Stirling in
Scotland and at the Nordic Institute of Asian
Studies in Copenhagen Denmark. He has also been Visiting Professor at
the University of Hawaii. His books include Religious Violence in
Contemporary Japan: the Case of Aum Shinrikyō (Richmond UK and Honolulu,
USA: Curzon and the University of Hawaii Press), while his new book
Making Pilgrimages, Making Meanings: Landscape and Practice in the Shikoku
Henro is in press with the University of Hawaii Press. His wife Dorothy
is a professional translator of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Japanese, and
they have two children, Rosie and Philip.
Back to Top
Copyright: Ian Reader
This page was first created on 3 March 2004. It was last modified on
30 January 2006.
This website is best viewed with
a screen resolution of 1024x768 pixels and using Microsoft
Internet Explorer or Mozilla
Firefox. No modifications have been made to the main text of this page
since it was first posted on ejcjs.
If you have any suggestions for improving or adding to this page
or this site then please e-mail your suggestions to the editor.
If you have any difficulties with this website then please send
an e-mail to the
webmaster.
|
|