Abstract 51 – The Absent Shrine: Arctolatry in the Japanese Archipelago

David Laichtman

“The Absent Shrine” is an analysis of bear worship in the Japanese archipelago. It contends with
the apparent paradox of A. Irving Hallowell’s boreal arctolatric ubiquity premise and the lack of
institutionalized ursine religion in Japan. A document and artifact based survey provides the
historical context of bear religion for Ainu, Okhotsk, and Mountain Reverence groups in the
archipelago. A Lived Religion ethnographic approach undertaken via participant observation
and semi-structured interviews of hunters, conservationists, photographers, and camera-
trappers is the basis of an evaluation of contemporary bear worship, allowing for a description
of how the modern and historical practices differ. By then engaging with the praxis/doxis
dialectic in Japanese religious studies, the work concludes that despite its incongruence with
institutionally-predicated religious complexes, bear worship persists as an archipelago-spanning
numinous qualia. By constructing a novel spectrum for use as a metric of religious adherence,
and applying this conclusion thereto, “The Absent Shrine” reframes not just bear worship, but
the religious experience in the archipelago, as a mechanism for reckoning with the kinetic
triangular relationship between humans, animals, and environmental spaces.