Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on exorcism in contemporary Japan, relying on data gathered at Kenmi shrine in Tokushima Prefecture. I argue that healing emerges from serendipitous consequential engagements with actors that end up constituting a technology of affect which also elicits detachment from suffering.

Paper long abstract:

Recent anthropological research has analyzed experiences with spirits as based on bodily affordances that ground ‘the cultural kindling’ of spiritual experiences (Cassaniti and Luhrmann 2014). Notably, anthropologist Tanya Lurmann’s (2012) study on hearing the voice of God among American Evangelicals, suggested that through religious practices, Evangelicals learn to retrace the borders between their own thoughts and what they become enskilled in identifying as God’s messages. Luhrmann claimed that such experiences become possible because tracing the border between what is internal to the self and what is not, is something that people are socialized into. Other studies have emphasized the role of enskilment and entrainment in processes of learning possession, as well as the role of feelings and perceptions as grounds for possession states.

In this paper, I will rely on such analytical approaches, while applying them to healing from afflictive possession. In order to do so, I will focus on ethnographic data gathered through fieldwork at Kenmi shrine in contemporary Tokushima Prefecture. This shrine is renown in the whole Japan because of its ritual to exorcise from spirit possession, especially possession by the Dog-God (inugami). Firstly, I will introduce the feelings experienced by sufferers during the ritual and their experienced of having been “relieved.” Secondly, I will suggest that the ritual has a technological dimension which elicits certain affects, and that repeatedly undergoing the ritual leads to the sufferer’s wellbeing as a form of enskilment.

I will show that feelings of relief are not only the result of the ritual, but also of engagements with other actors that surround it, such as the street to go to the shrine, or the natural environment. Thus, I shed light on the technologies of affect that lead to the deliverance from evil spirits, arguing that “healing” emerges as a result of engagements with a variety of actors that end up configuring a technology of affect because of their serendipitous consequentiality. I will also show how such technology of affect contributes to elicit detachment from the initial suffering conditions, by enabling the disassembling of specific affective entanglements, while allowing for new connections with others.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how embodying the power of chanting Soka Gakkai youth create new affective spaces detached from Japanese patriarchal norms; through the affective technology of chanting for a 'greater self' the need for egalitarian relations come to intricately underpin their sense of well-being.

Paper long abstract:

Processes of detachment of past practices in the (re)making of the social characterised Soka Gakkai as it moved Nichiren Buddhism from a focus on priestly rituals to an ‘art of living’. This paper discusses the various individual, social and political layers of a daily practice of chanting nam-myōho-renge-kyō, a process felt to be a self-empowering cognitive-emotional transformation, a ‘technology of affect’ to reveal one’s ‘greater self’. This is also a process of detachment to alter past structured emotions and outlooks that inevitably involves a negotiation of hitherto normative sensibilities, or habitus. In the context of Japan, feelings of meiwaku, or causing trouble to others is a sentiment that captures the strongly felt pressure to conform to established social expectations. Such forms for structured self-regulation in public spaces, or tatemae performativity speak deeply to how one chooses to act and speak in what is considered authoritative and normative ways of behaving. In Japan where speaking about ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ generally make for socially uncomfortable topics, if not taboo, Soka Gakkai also experienced deeply a felt pressure to appear ‘normal’ in wake of the excommunication from the Nichiren Shōshū priesthood and the Aum Shinrikyo affair in the 1990s, and saw its own forms for routinization of 'perfection' partly to avoid the meiwaku label and stigmatisation of ‘bad’ religion. Such ‘Japanization’, however, is being challenged by contemporary Soka Gakkai youth. This is particularly occurring in the way that Japan’s most ‘sacred’ postwar strata of the salaryman doxa is being revoked. Affecting detachment from established sensibilities and social expectations is not so much in terms of cutting oneself off from certain relations as it is transforming established normative attitudes on various fronts - work, friendship groups, club activities and Soka Gakkai organizational culture itself. I discuss these processes of affecting detachment and remaking of the social through ethnographic examples of younger Japanese and overseas Soka Gakkai members living in Japan; negotiating patriarchal hegemonic structures by creating new affective spaces and ontological realities seek to establish egalitarian socialities as something deeply rooted in notions of what a ‘greater self’ is that is affected through chanting.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores practices of reading the air to try to avoid creating trouble (meiwaku). Meiwaku emerges as a strong affective force that shapes the air and results in feelings of difference and detachment. However, the sharing of such feelings can also be constitutive of new relations.

Paper long abstract:

Food and sociality are inextricably linked. A cursory glance into any izakaya window provides a glimpse of its importance to relationality and connection as people chat over a variety of dishes. Such food sociality can be, however, complicated when an individual has to check the ingredients of every dish before eating. As such, people with food allergies talk often about how they feel they have to ‘read the air’ (kūki wo yomu) and not create trouble (meiwaku) when disclosing their allergies.

Reading the air is a highly valued communicative skill in Japan (Maemura 2014; Roquet 2016). It shapes expectations, motivations, and actions within social settings and facilitates smooth relations (Kimura 2010). Not being able to read the air is correspondingly understood as disruptive and damaging to social settings and the smooth management of social relations. It is a skill that is learned, embodied, intersubjective, and situationally dependent, and it entails not just looking or listening but using the whole of the body – and others’ bodies – to perceive, understand and respond to specific social settings.

In this paper I explore how people in Japan try to avoid creating trouble for others and themselves by reading the air when disclosing their food allergies. I trace how the concept of meiwaku - and the feelings of concern that emerge from attempting to avoid creating meiwaku – emerges as a strong affective force that shapes the air. For some, it produces and reinforces feelings of difference, and a process of detachment emerges in social encounters that involve food as well as a sense of separation and non-understanding from classmates and colleagues, shaping their relationships at university and work in diverse ways. However, in events for people with food allergies, feelings of detachment and difference can be constitutive of a sense of community though the sharing of experiences and strategies that they use to (dis)engage from/with food-related sociality. This paper consequently analyses how feelings and affects that emerge from reading the air and attempting to avoid trouble contributes to the lived experience of difference and (dis)connection in food-related sociality in Japan.