| This thesis examines the role of Japanese rites known as hoji in mediating the personal and social reintegration processes attending bereavement. Since hoji are observed at increasing intervals for a potentially unlimited period, they provide a unique opportunity to investigate over a longer period hitherto attempted the affective dimensions of the bereavement experience within an ongoing social context. Evaluating the anthropological and psychological literature on the subject of bereavement to date, I argue that each discipline has analyzed bereavement experience with insufficient attention to the other, and that neither psychology nor anthropology has paid adequate attention to the religious dimension. Further, ethnographers have been reluctant to question how their subjects appropriate traditional religious discourse. Religious studies of these rites have treated them as part of "ancestor worship" or with attention to their Buddhist and Shinto roots, but only scant attention has been paid to their Confucian elements. This thesis attempts a new style of fieldwork and reflection to integrate the requisite disciplines. It focuses on one family in depth over a period of more than two years following the death of their matriarch. In addition, it discusses interviews over the same time frame with another dozen subjects who are at various points along the infinite continuum governed by these rites with respect to a variety of losses (of spouses, parents, children, cousins, a pet). In addition to extensive description as a participant/observer, I reflect on these "thick descriptions" in the light of the concerns of psychologists and anthropologists but also with respect to normative issues in both Confucian and Christian traditions (Confucian notions of sincerity and reciprocity and Christian conceptions of God). I approach the work of Confucian philosopher Tu Weiming and Christian theologians Richard R. Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr as an ethnographer and an Episcopal priest attempting a theologically sound and ethically responsible appreciation of the personal religious and moral experiences undergone by my subjects. Studying classic and modern Confucian texts helps us to see bereavement as a species of opportunity for life-long moral self-cultivation where the stakes include confronting the pressing question of what is worth dying for. |
