Immortal Wishes

Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain

Ellen Schattschneider

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English

Duke University Press
16 April 2003

Shintoism; Physical anthropology & ethnography

""Immortal Wishes"" is a powerful ethnographic rendering of religious rituals and ascetic practices at the Akakura Mountain Shrine in northern Japan. Inspired by a vision of a dragon arising out of Akakura Mountain, a peasant woman founded the Shinto sect in 1921. Since then, worshippers, predominantly women, have come to the shrine to participate in what can be years, or even decades, of a regimen of ""shugyo"" (disciplined practice), which often involves arduous physical tasks including treks up the mountainside. Ellen Schattschneider argues that the ascetic discipline and rituals at Akakura Mountain Shrine are generated by a complex set of social and historical tensions, some of which reflect the uneasy status of the surrounding area within the modern nation's industrial and postindustrial economies. Yet, Schattschneider explains, spiritual practice at the Akakura shrine is also motivated by the efforts of women and men to comprehend and manage contradictory obligations and desires related to personal health, family, and work. Schattschneider participated in ""shugyo"" herself, and ""Immortal Wishes"" is full of details drawn from conversations, events, climbs, interviews, and outings. She relates the histories of the practice and individual practitioners, annual rituals, various steps and elements involved in specific ""shugyo"", the exchanges of offerings, legendary dreams, and the conflicted issues of succession raised by the founder's death. In describing how personal loss and travail are transposed onto the mountain landscape as spiritual transcendence is sought through worship and practical labour, Schattschneider reveals the deeply embodied nature of a religion physically labored at with a subtlety and intensity as sensual as it is spiritual.

By: Ellen Schattschneider
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 146mm, Spine: 25mm
Weight: 422g
ISBN: 9780822330622
ISBN 10: 0822330628
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 16 April 2003
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Ellen Schattschneider is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University.

Reviews for Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain

""In this pioneering study of ascetic ritual practice in northern Honshu, Japan, Ellen Schattschneider takes what, in other hands, could have been a more traditional subject and infuses it with a conceptual sharpness that makes its analyses of interest to far more than specialists in religion, Japan, or nature-based worship."" Anne Allison, Duke University ""Rich in ethnographic detail on a topic that is fascinating and important, Immortal Wishes is a very clear description and analysis of the actual doing of mountain ascetic discipline, and of its theological, emotional, and social context."" L. Keith Brown, University of Pittsburgh