2002 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Comparative and Comprehensive Studies on the Religious Significance of Death and the Dead
| Project/Area Number |
12610029
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Religious studies
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
IKEZAWA Masaru The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, Associate Professor, 大学院・人文社会系研究科, 助教授 (90250993)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2000 – 2002
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| Keywords | Death / Rituals of Death / Worship of the dead / Ancestor Worship / The Other World / Thanaloloey |
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| Research Abstract |
The purpose of this research is to gather and pigeonhole comprehensively the information of the religious studies on death, the dead and thanatology, in order to grasp the total picture of these studies. The results of this research have been published in the printed report.
There are Iwo tasks lo be done for attaining the purpose of this research. The first one is to collect the death-related studies from various viewpoints, to make a bibliography of them, and to summarize them, The first part of the report is the bibliography of books and papers concerned with death and the dead. The second part of the report includes the summaries of selected materials. Theses enable readers to have a general information on what kinds of studies have been made and what kinds of ideas have been presented in this area.
The other lask is to make clear the ideas about death and the dead in various cultures from the typological point of view, so as to compare them with each other. However, it is quite diff
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icult for a single researcher to carry out this task. It is more reasonable to make a "sample" concerning the area that the present researcher specializes in. Part Three of the printed report is for this purpose. It is discussed in this part that there were in ancient and medieval China two types of the dead (or death), which were contrary to each other, and that priority gradually shift from the one (the "ancestor" type) to the other (the "ghost" type). This shift of the view on the dead reflected the change of the view on the human beings.
The result of this research may be one-sided, because (he viewpoint of the present researcher is based on a specific discipline of religious studies. However, the research is meaningful in the points of showing that religious views on death should not be recognized simply as the beliefs of spirits of the dead or the other worlds but as the strategies to make life meaningful in spite of the destruction of death, and therefore they have important values for the modern societies. Less
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Research Products
(2 results)
