Table Of ContentRELIGION IN
HISTORY, SOCIETY,
AND CULTURE
Edited by
Frank Reynolds
and
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
The University of Chicago, Divinity
School
A ROUTLEDGE SERIES
RELIGION IN HISTORY, SOCIETY, AND
CULTURE
edited by Frank Reynolds and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
1. LAS ABEJAS
Pacifist Resistance and Syncretic Identities in a Globalizing
Chiapas
Marco Tavanti
2. THE SPIRIT OF DEVELOPMENT
Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe
Erica Bornstein
3. EXPLAINING MANTRAS
Ritual, Rhetoric, and the Dream of a Natural Language in
Hindu Tantra
Robert A.Yelle
4. LITURGY WARS
Ritual Theory and Protestan’t Reform in Nineteenth-Century
Zurich
Theodore M.Vial
5. HEAVENLY JOURNEYS, EARTHLY CONCERNS
The Legacy of the Mi’raj in the Formation of Islam
Brooke Olson Vuckovic
6. LEST WE BE DAMNED
Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in
Protestant England, 1559–1642
Lisa McClain
THE Fox’s CRAFT IN
JAPANESE
RELIGION AND
FOLKLORE
SHAPESHIFTERS,
TRANSFORMATIONS AND
DUPLICITIES
MICHAEL BATHGATE
ROUTLEDGE
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Published in 2004 by
Routledge
29 West 35th Street
New York, NY 10001
www.routledge-ny.com
Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE
www.routledge.co.uk
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bathgate, Michael, 1967–
The fox’s craft in Japanese religion and folklore: shapeshifters,
transformations, and
duplicities/by Michael Bathgate.
p. cm.—(Religion in history, society & culture; 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-96821-6 (alk. paper)
1. Foxes—Religious aspects. 2. Foxes—Japan—Folklore. 3. Inari. 4. Japan—
Religious life
and customs. I. Title. II. Series.
BL12211.I5B37 2003
398′.3699775′0952–dc22
2003014635
ISBN 0-203-48476-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-57929-1 (Adobe eReader Format)
For Wanda, who taught me stories,
And for Buzz, who lived one.
Contents
Series Editors’ Foreword viii
Preface x
1 The Jewel Maiden and the Murder Stone: 1
Orientations to Shapeshifting and Signification
Metamorphosis and Duplicity 7
Imagined Foxes, Imagined Worlds 17
Shapeshifting and Signification 25
2 Foxes, Wives and Spirits: Shapeshifting and the 33
Languages of Marriage
Vampires, Lovers and Ancestors 38
“A World Never Quite Her Own” 46
Visiting Husbands, Visiting Wives 50
Good Sons and Wives on Probation 60
Shapeshifting, Marriage and the Sacred 67
3 To Whom Am I Speaking? Shapeshifting and the 71
Semiotics of Revelation
“Is it really you?” 74
Shifty Means and Hidden Ends 82
Foxes and the Politics of Revelation 94
Foxes in Semiotic Theory and Practice 1 00
4 The Gift of the Fox: Shapeshifting and the Power of 1 02
Wealth
Shifting Values and Shitty Wealth 1 04
The Black Lineage of the Nouveaux Riches 1 21
vii
Foxes, Inari and the End of the World 1 36
5 Using the Fox: The Crafts of Shapeshifting and 1 40
Signification
Signification and the Contest of Sorcerers 1 43
The Persistence of Heresy 1 53
Foxes and the Foreign 1 53
Foxes and the Folk 1 60
Foxes Past and Future 1 63
Man Into Fox 1 66
Glossary 1 69
Bibliography 1 73
Index 1 85
Series Editors’ Foreword
Religion in History, Society and Culture brings to a wider
audience work by outstanding young scholars who are forging
new agendas for the study of religion in the twenty-first
century. As editors, we have two specific goals in mind.
First, volumes in this series illumine theoretical
understandings of religion as a dimension of human culture
and society. Understanding religion has never been a more
pressing need. Longstanding academic habits of either
compartmentalizing or ignoring religion are breaking down.
With the entry of religion into the academy, however, must
come a fully realized conversation about what religion is and
how it interacts with history, society, and culture. Each book
in this series employs and refines categories and methods of
analysis that are intrinsic to the study of religion, while
simultaneously advancing our knowledge of the character and
impact of particular religious beliefs and practices in a specific
historical, social, or cultural context.
Second, this series is interdisciplinary. The academic study
of religion is conducted by historians, sociologists, political
scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, and others. Books in
the series bring before the reader an array of disciplinary
lenses through which religion can be creatively and critically
viewed. Based on the conviction that the instability of the
category itself generates important insights, “religion” in these
works encompasses and/or informs a wide range of religious
phenomena, including myths, rituals, ways of thought,
institutions, communities, legal traditions, texts, political
movements, artistic production, gender roles, and identity
formation.
In The Fox’s Craft (the sixth book in the series), Michael
Bathgate generates a richly researched structural history of
the fox-focused imagery that was ubiquitous in the religious
imaginaire of traditional Japan. Working through a
millennium of Japanese history, he brilliantly identifies and
analyzes the themes of shapeshifting, deception, and duplicity
ix
that characterized this imagery in virtually all of the contexts
in which it was deployed. At the same time, he vividly
describes several very different articulations of fox-related
patterns that were associated with particular historical and
social contexts. He explores ways in which these patterns were
used to identify and interpret the ambiguous position of
maternal identity in the negotiation of patrilineal family
relations. He demonstrates how they were quite differently
deployed in order to identify and contest various Shinto,
Buddhist, and syncretistic understandings of divine revelation.
He provides a fascinating account of distinctive ways in which
they were marshaled in order to explain and confront a major
seventeenth—and eighteenth-century economic
transformation that threatened the stability of the traditional
social order. In a fascinating final chapter he goes on to
explore various ways in which nineteenth—and twentieth-
century nativist and empiricist interpretations of the
character of fox imagery were deeply implicated in the
construction of the Japanese mode of modernity.
Those who have strong theoretical interests will be
especially engaged by Bathgate’s interpretation of the ways in
which the Japanese storytellers and the characters they depict
utilize fox imagery as a kind of semiotic metalanguage that
enables them to deal creatively with “the troubling
indeterminacies at work in undermining the integrity of
human regimes of significance.” Rejecting the notion that fox
imagery and the narratives in which they were embedded can
be easily dismissed as a form of popular superstition,
Bathgate takes great care to demonstrate how it is that they
display epistemological insights, rhetorical strategies, and
techniques of signification that can be usefully juxtaposed to
the comparable insights, strategies, and techniques that
inform his own research.
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The University of Chicago,
Divinity School
Frank Reynolds, The University of Chicago, Divinity School
