Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion?

Description

This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this "new spirituality culture"; by "spiritual therapists" who have sought to eke out a livelihood in an increasingly professionalized and regulated therapeutic field; and by the cruel optimism of an increasingly precarious workforce placing its hopes in the imagined alternative that the supirichuaru represents. Ioannis Gaitanidis offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of 'alternativity' that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies and the anthropology/sociology of medicine.

Ioannis Gaitanidis is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Global and Transdisciplinary Studies, Chiba University, Japan.

This book is essential reading for scholars and students interested in spirituality, what it does, and how it became a business, lifestyle and scholarly discipline in contemporary Japan. Rigorously researched and based on extensive original materials, it provides invaluable insights and is an important addition to the field. * Erica Baffelli, Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Manchester, UK * An important contribution to the study of contemporary Japanese religion. This volume is insightful and rich in ethnographic detail, portraying spiritual therapists as freelance workers in a precarious economy. It also provides much-needed correctives to academic narratives of the so-called "spirituality boom" or "commodification of religion". * Aike P. Rots, Associate Professor of Japan Studies, University of Oslo, Norway *