2006 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
An investigation of the dynamic aspect of the image of life and death in Southeast Asian metropolitan cities
| Project/Area Number |
16520051
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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 | Tohoku University |
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Principal Investigator |
SUZUKI Iwayumi Tohoku University, Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Professor, 大学院・文学研究科, 教授 (50154521)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2006
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| Keywords | Religious Studies / death / Indonesia / Southeast Asia / metropolitan city / ritual / prayer meeting / epigraph |
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| Research Abstract |
This research aimed to investigate the image of life and death held by people who live in metropolitan areas in Indonesia. Those areas could be said to be one of the most pluralistic society in Asia because we can see the people who speak a lot of different kinds of languages, and who live with a lot of different kinds of cultures or religions there. Related to this fact, we dare not to adopt the conventional ethnographical approach to depict the image of life and death as if it was logically integrated unity. Rather, we focused on the fact that it was talked or expressed by a person or persons to someone with some intentions in some social context. In another words, it was expressed in some practice.
Accepting on this point, we tried to concentrate our attention to the practices in which people expressed their image of life and death directly. Finally we chose 3 types of such practices ritual activities, prayer meetings and grave buildings. We did research in Indonesian metropolitan ci
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ties, Medan and Jakarta, and collect concrete data like tape recordings of the rituals and the meetings or the message inscribed on the graves along with its background in order to understand the social context of those practices.
As a result, we sought out the rich diversity of the discourses or expressions about death even in a "single" culture or religion. Those are far from static one as we can see in the classical ethnographies like Warneck's Die Religion der Batak, which I mentioned in our final report, but dynamic and strategically one. The strong emotions provoked by death was used by the people who addressed those expressions for various purposes; to give the consolation for remains, to establish solidarity in a clan members, to grief his miserable condition, to condemn other person, to let people pay more attention to their "sinners" etc. And also, as the data about transformation of the epigraphs showed us, it could be changed as time goes on. In short, the static descriptions of the image of life and death tend to neglect the social contexts or personal strategies that underlie those expressions. Our study showed at least a way to investigate those expressions using concrete data. Less
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Research Products
(4 results)
