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Soka Gakkai's Human Revolution - The Rise of a Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan (Paperback)
Loot Price: R866
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Soka Gakkai's Human Revolution - The Rise of a Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan (Paperback)
Series: Contemporary Buddhism
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Soka Gakkai is Japan's largest and most influential new religious
organization: It claims more than 8 million Japanese households and
close to 2 million members in 192 countries and territories. The
religion is best known for its affiliated political party, Komeito
(the Clean Government Party), which comprises part of the ruling
coalition in Japan's National Diet, and it exerts considerable
influence in education, media, finance, and other key areas. Levi
McLaughlin’s comprehensive account of Soka Gakkai draws on nearly
two decades of archival research and non-member fieldwork to
account for its institutional development beyond Buddhism and
suggest how we should understand the activities and dispositions of
its adherents. McLaughlin explores the group's Nichiren Buddhist
origins and turns to insights from religion, political science,
anthropology, and cultural studies to characterize Soka Gakkai as
mimetic of the nation-state. Ethnographic vignettes combine with
historical evidence to demonstrate ways Soka Gakkai's twin Buddhist
and modern humanist legacies inform the organization's mimesis of
the modern Japan in which the group took shape. To make this
argument, McLaughlin analyzes Gakkai sources heretofore untreated
in English-language scholarship; provides a close reading of the
serial novel The Human Revolution, which serves the Gakkai as both
history and de facto scripture; identifies ways episodes from
members' lives form new chapters in its growing canon; and
contributes to discussions of religion and gender as he chronicles
the lives of members who simultaneously reaffirm generational
transmission of Gakkai devotion as they pose challenges for the
organization's future. Readers looking for analyses of the
nation-state and strategies for understanding New Religions and
modern Buddhism will find Soka Gakkai's Human Revolution to be an
especially thought-provoking study that offers widely applicable
theoretical models.
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