Abstract
This chapter introduces the edited volume, which builds on initial case studies of popular idolatry in Japan, or what Aoyagi Hiroshi intended in the first decade of the new millennium to establish as a subfield of symbolic anthropology called “idology,” but goes further to provide a transcultural perspective to guide anthropological investigations of popular idolatry in different places and times. While agreeing that Japan—which Aoyagi refers to as “islands of eight million smiles,” a reference to a vision of Japan populated by gods/idols—is a fascinating place to start, it is not the only place where popular idolatry comes to resemble religion or spirituality. On the one hand, a transcultural approach addresses some of the shortcomings of scholars delving into case studies of contemporary idolatry without cross-cultural or historical perspective. On the other hand, a transcultural approach pushes back against arguments about cultural uniqueness, which tend to make forms static or even nationalized. In proposing an integrated paradigm for the growing body of literature on idols, the volume redirects recurrent questions to more fundamental points of sociocultural inquiry and facilitates cross-cultural, critical and collaborative discussion. The introduction also calls for advancing the theoretical framework and methodology of idology by bringing anthropology into dialogue with science and technology studies and the growing body of literature on animation.
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Notes
- 1.
By “transcultural,” we simply mean “involving, encompassing, or extending across two or more cultures.” See the Merriam-Webster dictionary at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transcultural.
- 2.
For more on the connection of idols and religion or spirituality in Japan, see Aoyagi 2005: 25–55. This can be expanded in dialogue with Miller and Copeland 2018. Beyond Japan, scholars of India have argued that admiration and affection for Bollywood stars are similar to the worship of Hindu gods, up to and including the establishment of fan-made temples (e.g., Dwyer and Patel 2002; Bhattacharya 2013; Kishore 2014).
- 3.
When producers of idols claim the power of “mass control” (Marx 2012: 37), we are best served by assuming that they are given to delusions of grandeur. Things are in practice much less top-down. The questions for “mana workers,” as anthropologist William Mazzarella terms them, include, “What makes one thing or person resonate with another? What can such resonances bring into—or keep out of—the world? What are the representations that, deployed at the right time, will facilitate participation?” (Mazzarella 2017: 148). As mana workers, idol producers are, in a manner of speaking, concerned with issues of resonance and responsivity (Mazzarella 2017: 148, 153–154, 168; also Jenkins 2006). The cultivation and exploitation of affective responses, perhaps vulnerabilities, is key.
- 4.
See the Merriam-Webster dictionary at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idol.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Anthropologists increasingly concur that we live in worlds of imagination, or worlds where the imagination is “social fact” and “social practice” (Appadurai 1996: 31; also Allison 2006). They venture into worlds of entangled existence, “more-than-humans worlds” (Anderson 2012: 28; also Tsing 2015). While some advocate for anthropology focusing only on representational “living beings” (e.g., Kohn 2013), images, stones and more can be significant others and actors (e.g., Cambre 2012; Raffles 2015). As researchers, we must stretch our imaginations to better appreciate interactions and relations with them.
- 8.
There are arguments to be made about the congruity of animation and augmentation (e.g., Roquet 2016), which brings to mind the cyborg specifically and science and technology studies generally. Indeed, anthropologists highlight “objects whose animacy is augmented by AI” (White and Katsuno 2021: 233). In contrast, discourses on animism in contemporary Japan, religious studies scholar Fabio Rambelli cautions us, are often “not simply descriptions of beliefs and practices, but normative accounts of idealized visions of Japanese cultural identity and spirituality in general” (Rambelli 2019: 9). This quickly shades into proclamations of cultural or national uniqueness that run counter to our goals here. To the extent that we take something from new approaches to animism, it is that the animation of other-than-human loci “is more than a belief, an embodied practice, or a foil for our critiques of Western mechanistic representations of nature” (Kohn 2013: 72–73). Anthropological literature suggests the need for “new ways of getting spirit worlds […] into view” and “repopulating the field of inquiry with more than beliefs” (Jensen et al. 2016: 150). An excellent example of this is anthropologist Andrea De Antoni’s work on possession in rural Japan, where spirits are “entangled in materiality and social practice, experienced by the body, and in constant change” (De Antoni 2019: 114). The actions of spirits intrude on reality and impact the social. Feelings and experiences are part of what makes spirits act and move as they do, which we agree is not entirely reducible to “symbolic aspects and socially shared narratives” (De Antoni 2019: 118). It is also not a matter of belief: “After all, the ontological existence of anything (not only deities) is independent of any individual’s personal beliefs; on the other hand, the phenomenological existence of spirit-like entities can be experienced also by people who don’t believe in them” (Rambelli 2019: 11). This existence can also be “mediated by particular places […] and enhanced by media coverage and intersubjective discourses” (Rambelli 2019: 11). For a fascinating case study of the power of vocalizing and hearing voices together in northern Japan, which is a type of social care and mutual vulnerability completely independent of “belief,” see Nakamura 2013: 114–132. For differing approaches to the issue of belief in idolization, see Chaps. 3 and 10.
- 9.
Introducing spirituality in contemporary Japan, Rambelli reminds us that “pop culture […] plays an important role in the creation and diffusion of discourses about spirits,” and such discourses “often exist separately from explicit religious forms” (Rambelli 2019: 1, 5). Pop spirituality is of course not limited to Japan. For an example of manga/anime-style character figurines appearing alongside and as religious icons in temples in Taiwan, see Silvio 2008.
- 10.
We are thinking here of art historian W.J.T. Mitchell’s writing on what pictures “want,” or the “lives and loves of images” (Mitchell 2005).
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Aoyagi, H., Galbraith, P.W., Kovacic, M. (2021). Idology in Transcultural Perspective: Anthropological Investigations of Popular Idolatry. In: Hiroshi, A., Galbraith, P.W., Kovacic, M. (eds) Idology in Transcultural Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82677-2_1
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