Hell is round the corner: religious landscapes, people and identity in contemporary Japan

My Ph.D. dissertation, proposes an anthropological analysis of religious sites related to representations of hell and the afterlife in contemporary Japan. I carried out three six-month periods of multi-sited fieldwork, distributed in five main localities characterized by religious symbolism and practices that connoted them as “actual hells”: Osorezan in Mutsu-shi, Rokuhara in Kyoto, Ashikuraji (Tateyama-chō), Hakone and Hirano-ku in Osaka, in order to produce an analysis in a comparative perspective. I propose a study, mainly based on a heuristic approach and on theories of cultural complexity, of the symbolic religious discourses and practices related to death and the afterlife, as well as of how their meaning was constructed and (re-)produced, both at a local and translocal level. Subsequently, I contextualize those narratives in a historical perspective and connected them to contemporary socio-economic conditions of the areas, with a main focus on processes of construction of identity and of meaning making of religious symbolism and place.