Purity Workshop 2010
Tools
Dates and Locations:
February 18-19, 2010
Description
Since at least the emergence of the kokugaku movements of eighteenth and nineteenth century Japan, it has been asserted that an essential component of Japanese religiosity has been native conceptions of purity and defilement. Even today, introductory textbooks regularly suggest that notions of purity and rites of purification have served as cultural constants that are of fundamental importance for understanding Japanese religion and even Japanese culture. This orientation has in turn informed scholarly discourses on such diverse topics as funerary rites, bloodshed, the role of women, and even the Imperial system within Japanese religious history. Within broader cultural discourse, notions of purity and taboo have also longed served as important organizing principals for defining and categorizing everything from genres of text, to relations between Japanese and Chinese cultural forms, to the structuring and representation of space.
Despite their central importance for our understanding of Japanese cultural and religious identity, these and other such claims have received surprisingly little critical scholarly attention in the west. Recent research, however, has shown that throughout Japanese history conceptions of purity, taboo and ritual danger have varied greatly not only over time, but also within social and political contexts. Conceptions of what is pure and defiled, far from being cultural givens, have been widely manipulated, contested and modified by actors across the spectrum of religious and cultural practice. While focusing on Japan’s Nara (710-784) and Heian (794-1185) periods, the goal of this workshop will be to explore the forces behind the bewildering proliferation of conceptions of purity and danger that emerged during this time frame and examine their role in the production and regulation of cultural and religious forms.
Schedule
Thursday, February 18th (403 Kent Hall)
6:00 p.m. Opening & Welcome Remarks: Michael Como (Columbia)
6:10 p.m. Keynote Speech: Herman Ooms (UCLA), “Purity, 650-950: A Tentative Trajectory”
7:00 p.m. Question & Answer Session
7:30 p.m. Move to dinner at Sezz Medi
Friday, February 19th (403 Kent Hall)
9:00-9:30 a.m. Breakfast (in front of 403 Kent Hall)
9:30-11:00 a.m. Panel 1
David Lurie (Columbia), “Linguistic Purity in Early Japan?”
Torquil Duthie (UCLA), “Yoshino and the Tenmu Cult”
Discussant: Haruo Shirane (Columbia)
11:00-11:15 a.m. Coffee Break
11:15 a.m.-12:45 p.m. Panel 2
Sam Morse (Amherst), “The Seven Sacred Mountains as Sites of Rites of Repentance--The Case of the Jingoji Yakushi”
Bryan Lowe (Princeton), “The Discipline of Writing: Scribes and Purity in Eighth Century Japan”
Discussant: Bernard Faure (Columbia)
12:45-1:45 p.m. Lunch in 628 Kent Hall
1:45-3:15 p.m. Panel 3
Heather Blair (Indiana), “Vessel or Mother of the Buddhas? Women, Buddhahood, and Scriptural Invention”
Michael Como (Columbia), “Real Gods Eat Meat”
Discussant: Jackie Stone (Princeton)
3:15–3:30 p.m. Coffee Break
3:30-5:00 p.m. Panel 4
Tom Conlan (Bowdoin), “Ritual Determinism in Fourteenth Century Japan”
Lisa Grumbach (UC–Berkeley), “Purity, the State, and the Magic of Meat: State Demands for Purity and the Meanings of Meat and Vegetarianism (Meat Avoidance) in Medieval Japanese Shrine Practices”
Discussant: Greg Pflugfelder (Columbia)
5:00-5:15 p.m. Closing Remarks
5:30 p.m. Informal Dinner (in front of 403 Kent)
