Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan

Beyond Religion?

Ioannis Gaitanidis (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

264 Seiten

2022
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-350-26261-4 (ISBN)

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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.

List of Figures
List of Graphs
Acknowledgments
Note on Naming Conventions
Introduction
1. Spiritual Therapists
2. Spiritual Academia
3. Print Spirituality
4. Alternative Therapies in the Age of Attention
5. Precarities in the Spiritual Business
6. Spirituality on Trial
Conclusion: Spirituality and the ‘Alternative’
List of Japanese Terms and Names
Notes
References
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	03.11.2022
Reihe/Serie	Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies
Zusatzinfo	10 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
ISBN-10	1-350-26261-7 / 1350262617
ISBN-13	978-1-350-26261-4 / 9781350262614
Zustand	Neuware