Namgok Lee THE LEAP(보통의 깨달음)을 보며 저자와 다른 느낌들.

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Namgok Lee

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THE LEAP (보통의 깨달음)을 보며 저자와 다른 느낌들.

스티브 테일러

저자; 유년기와 깨어남 상태를 같다고 여기고 영적 계발이란 사실 유년기의 회복이라고 보는 전통들에 대해 지지하는 경향.

그 예로 도덕경과 예수의 말을 든다.

나; 저자가 소개하는 캔윌버의 견해.

'초개인적인 영적상태에 이르기 위해서는 먼저 에고가  계발되어야.

분리된 자아가 없는 상태에서 분리를 초월할 수는 없는 것이다.

아이들은 단지 안개 같은 무의식적 경험들 속에 빠져서 단순한 탈분화(☆영어 원문을 안보아서 모르겠지만 '탈분화'보다는 '미분화'라는 표현이 더 적합할 듯)를 겪고 있는지 모른다'

내 경험과 감각으로는 캔 윌버의 견해에 더 가깝다.

어린 아이의 상태를 너무 이상화하는 것은 마치 원시 상태의 인류를 이상화해서 에고가 발생하는 인류사의 전개를 '전락'으로 보는 것과 같다.

(물론 저자도 단순한 원시 상태로의 회복을 THE LEAP로 보지는 않다고 말하고 있지만)

노자도 '대교약졸' 등의 표현을 통해 단순한 회귀가 아님을 이야기하고 있기도 하다.

실제로 인류 역사 속에서 인류의 깨어남은 억압되었던 에고(욕망ㆍ분절된 개아)를 해방하는 과정(자본주의ㆍ개인중심 민주주의)을 거쳐 그 에고로부터 자유로워지고 싶은 단계로 '도약'하는 것이 아닐까 하는 것이 내 감각이다.

그런 도약을 위한 물적 토대와 노골적인 억압ㆍ착취가 사라지는(개인의 에고가 충분히 발휘되는)제도적 뒷밭침이 이런 도약을 가능케 한다.

그럼에도 에고의 관성이 너무 강해 탐욕이나 권력욕 등이 엄청난 물질 개벽에도 불구하고 그다지 변치 않는 심각한 문화지체를 겪고 있고, 인류의 위기(생태적 재앙)로 나타나고 있다.

시간이 허락한다면(망하지 않는다면), 나는 인간의  자유욕구가 인간의식의 보편적 도약을 가능케 하리라고 본다.

(이 점에 대해서는 솔직히 비관적인 생각이 들 때가 많지만)

3,000년전의 주역이 지금의 인간의 심리나 행동을 해석하는데 유효한 것이 어쩌면 이런 문화지체를 보여준다고 생각한다.

언젠가 주역 등이 인간 행위를 설명하는 것과 무관하게 되는 상태, 그것이 '도약'  혹은 '전환'이 아닐까 하는 생각을 하게 된다,

지금 벌어지고 있는 탐욕과 권력추구의 복마전을 보면서  어쩌면 우리가 반드시 통과해야할 터널일지 모른다는 생각이 든다.

도약(전환)의 길과 추락(쇠퇴)의 길을 선택하는 것은 결국 나도 포함되어 있는 우리 자신이다.

흔히 집단지성이라는 말도 하고, 민심이 천심이라는 말도 하지만, 직선 코스가 아닌 거칠고 험한 과정을 거친다.

더 늦기 전에 집단적 깨어남의 '도약'을 보고 싶다.(아마도 내 생전에는 못보겠지만)

 인류는 생존에 실패한 종으로  기록될지 모르지만 지구나 우주는 그의 역사를 계속할 것이다.

자업자득이다.

한 국가의 흥망성쇠는 그에 비하면 흔한 일이다.

이 책을 보면서 요즘 여러 현상들이 떠올라 두서없지만 하고 싶어지는 '머릿 속의 수다'다.

1 comment

백호현

거친과정이 깨어남의 도약을 위한 수순이라면

기다림이 해답일텐데~

작금의 우리사회의 추악한 복마전에

흔들리는 민심들을 보며

과연 민심이 천심이란것이 ~가당한지

의문이 들었습니다

자유민주주의를 이끌고가는 어리석은 다수가 될지도 모른다는

불안감이 듭니다🤔

이러한 민심이 천심이란 의미에 가당한지

궁금합니다

Patriotism, Secularism, and State Shintō: D.C. Holtom's Representations of Japan | PDF | Shinto | Japan

Patriotism, Secularism, and State Shintō: D.C. Holtom's Representations of Japan | PDF | Shinto | Japan

Patriotism, Secularism, and State Shintō: D.C. Holtom's Representations of Japan

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Patriotism, Secularism, and State Shintō

D.C. Holtom’s Representations of Japan

Avery Morrow, Carleton College <http://avery.morrow.name>

As published in Wittenberg University East Asian Studies Journal, vol. 36 (2011)

==

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ideology of religious studies with respect to early 20th century studies of Japan. Since 1945, “State Shintō” has been defined in academic literature as a state religion which was enforced by the Japanese government from an undetermined date after the Meiji Restoration until it was disestablished by the Allied Occupation. In fact, the Japanese government took concrete steps to separate their patriotic ceremonies from religion. Our current definition of the term “State Shintō” was produced by the religious scholar D.C. Holtom.

==

Imperial Japan represents a unique case in the history of civilization before World War II. Alone among its East Asian neighbors, it cast off the unequal treaties of the nineteenth century and became recognized by the European nations as a “Great Power”. The West had agreed in the prewar period that Japan had modernized itself and was to be treated as an equal. It was awarded mandate over a group of Pacific islands by the League of Nations after World War I, and would have been the first non-Western host of the Olympic Games were it not for wartime interruptions. 

To achieve this modernization, it was necessary to engender a perception of Japan as a cohesive nation-state. To this end, imperial Japanese authorities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries can be said to have invented a variety of teachings, actions, and physical institutions designed to inculcate reverence and obedience towards the state and its personification in the emperor. Notable among these were a national war memorial called Yasukuni Shrine (1869), a calendar of imperial holidays (1870s), a document called the Imperial Rescript on Education (1889), attendance at shrines by primary schools (1911), and installation of imperial photographs in homes, schools, and other institutions. For a government that was adapting itself to European civilization for the first time, this was a remarkably modern technique, paralleling contemporary American inventions such as Arlington National Cemetery (1864), Washington's Birthday and Flag Day (1880s), the Pledge of Allegiance (1892), the school flag movement (1890s), and so forth.

When the Allies occupied Japan in 1945, however, they saw these developments in a vastly different light. Japanese fascism, the Allies declared, was not merely reliant on local traditions but a “perversion of Shintō”, which was not a cultural vocabulary fit for use by civilized nations, but “a primitive religion put to modern uses.”  Confusingly, this meant that they could not ban Japanese fascism outright, because this would deny freedom of religion; instead, they could only “disestablish” it, even though there was no church or bureau which was responsible for all of the above institutions.

The direct consequence of this report was a document called the Shintō Directive, which in its own words “free[d] the Japanese people from ... compulsion to believe or profess to believe in a religion or cult officially designated by the state.” The Directive reorganized policies that were considered secular by the previous government into part of a religion.  The most visible consequence of this re-secularization of Japanese culture is the privatization of Yasukuni Shrine, the national war memorial which was once visited annually by the emperor. As a private religious organization, Yasukuni has honored war criminals in its shrine, invited paramilitary groups to its festivals, and built a museum on the shrine grounds devoted to a revisionist view of the Pacific War. These actions have led to international controversy in the postwar period, but the Japanese government is unable to regulate this behavior.  Why did the Allied regime privatize Yasukuni and other shrines it?

Superficially, privatization affirmed the superiority of the Western way of life, and critiqued Imperial Japan’s appropriation of secularist language as the sort of “inappropriate” uses of Western symbols that Homi Bhabha describes as “mimicry”. But the Allies were not consciously trying to create a colonial discourse; rather, they were relying on an existing narrative that denied the legitimacy of Japanese authority. I will here examine the writings of a religious scholar named D.C. Holtom who was largely responsible for creating this narrative, both to understand the normalcy of his opinions within the religious studies of his period and to provoke further thought about the role of religious scholars in constructing and upsetting balances of power.

The Modernization Project in Japan

In Edo period Japan (1603-1868), a mixture of shrines and temples dotted the Japanese landscape. The temples were built, staffed, and regulated by private monastic institutions, dedicated to Buddhist rites and education. The shrines, however, had no institutional affiliation, except where a Buddhist temple had stepped into maintain them. Shrines served important nonsectarian purposes in Japanese society: they were places where festivals were held and historical or mythological figures, called kami, were memorialized. The kami could be construed variously as heroes from an ancient era, figures who instilled Confucian morality, or an unseen, animist force.  If asked the common beliefs that all these shrines shared, an intellectual might wager the generic word shintō, meaning matters of kami, but not without a disclaimer: “The shintō are a difficult thing to speculate about.”  There was no singular Shintō, the way of the kami.

Because shrines were present throughout the country and mostly apolitical, they were employed by the state for censuses and public announcements towards the end of the Edo period. During the Meiji Restoration in 1868, part of the overthrow of the previous government was a “restoration” of the ancient ways of the kami according to a philosophical movement previously founded by Atsutane Hirata and Norinaga Motoori. These two philosophers had identified shrines as heirs to an indigenous Japanese identity superior to the “foreign” Buddhism, and aimed to “restore” their influence in Japanese society, but they were actually inventing a new power structure, so to implement it some new rules had to be made. Shrine owners now separated enshrined kami from the Buddhist images they had previously intermingled with (shinbutsu bunri). Many Buddhist monks left the priesthood to join this movement, but their training was too hasty and their mission too vague. In the popular press, their effort was dismissed as an “insignificant movement”, their public lectures were roundly mocked, and their ineffective government bureau was dubbed the “Ministry of Afternoon Naps.” The government ignored the call to declare their shintō, a term they popularized for the first time, the national religion.  Instead, a way forward for the shrines was proposed by the Buddhist priest Seiran Ōuchi (1845-1918), who relied on the new, Western idea of “religious freedom” when he composed a letter to the government bureau in charge of the restoration movement:

If you insist on calling this shintō a religion — we should really call it not merely a polytheistic religion, but a rag-bag religion ... if we attach the name religion to the veneration and worship of our imperial ancestors, then, with respect, what will happen is that those who believe that the spirits of the imperial ancestors repose eternally in the other realm will believe, but those who do not will make a mockery of it. Shintō rituals are national or public in character, and so the state should itself perform rites at national shrines. 

Bureaucrats implemented Ōuchi's idea without much variation. The system of national indoctrination was abandoned, and freedom of religion was declared throughout the country in the 1889 Meiji Constitution. But the “freedom of religion” was actually a freedom of personal faith, with an explicit disclaimer that religion could not interfere with public “peace and order.”  Religion in Japan was, and still is, considered a private matter of one's inner mind, while in contrast, morality was deemed, in the words of the modern scholar Jun’ichi Isomae, “a national, and thus a public, issue.”  Thus, a new Shrine Bureau was created that continued to own and operate the shrines as public moral institutions, even while a Religions Bureau was separated from it for the regulation of private Buddhist, Christian, and new religious sects.

The great majority of Japanese people accepted government control of shrines as uncontroversial, because it was scarcely different from how shrines were managed in the age of their parents and grandparents. They never recognized something called “Shintō” that was distinguishable from other habits of life in Japan, and even today, many Japanese will insist that shrines are not religious but function as a public, nonsectarian part of Japanese culture. The Shrine Bureau gave new prominence to the imperial shrine, Ise Jingū, and the imperial ancestors. New shrines were also built (e.g. Yasukuni Shrine) and existing shrines were remodeled to commemorate Japan’s war dead, an innovation on the existing, widely accepted practice of memorializing  ancestors to prevent them from coming back as disturbed spirits. Shrines were being used in a way akin to American flags and war memorials, as national monuments and civic institutions.

A number of laws were drawn up to prevent shrine priests from using their public position for private interests, and to separate them legally from private religious movements led by charismatic leaders, which were dubbed Sect or Religious Shintō. The term jinja was invented to distinguish shrines from other buildings that housed kami, and it was reserved for nonsectarian purposes. Shrine officials were prohibited from conducting funerals, which were the private business of Buddhists and Christians. They were also banned from proselytizing in any medium, whether by “sermon lecture, printed page or private conversation.”  Religious Shintō churches were banned from using the torii shrine gate, which was repurposed as a nonsectarian national symbol. These laws made some novel distinctions between religious and secular, causing angst among shrine priests who wanted to continue their “restoration”, but to make such distinctions was the intent of the government. They aimed to separate sect and shrine, so that shrine attendance could remain the duty of all Japanese no matter their private beliefs. 

These policies to distinguish religious Sect Shintō and secular Shrine Shintō had little effect on Japanese perceptions of Christianity. While it had traditionally been viewed as a foreign influence, beginning with the “Three Religions Conference” in 1912, Japanese Christians and missionaries alike were welcomed into the fold of Japanese society.  Even as relations between Japan and the West grew tense when Japan adopted fascist tendencies and invaded China, there were no restraints put on Christian schooling or missionary work. In 1940, William P. Woodard related his surprise that missionaries from quasi-hostile states continued to operate in Japan without interference, asking, “Is there another country in the world where this could occur?”  In this sense, at least, it is difficult to dispute the Japanese commitment to freedom of religion. But  at the same time, these minority communities often debated the influence of government in their everyday lives.

The Shrine Question

Even though the Japanese government was embracing freedom of religion and pluralism on its own terms, the Japanese Christian community was uncertain of whether to embrace government practices in return. For missionaries, Japan was an enigma: a Westernized state that had not embraced the religion popular among Western countries. The secular world considered Japan an equal partner in trade and diplomacy, but did that mean its  newly invented internal customs were civilized and secular? Both the foreign missionaries and Japanese converts felt confused and tested by the state's invented traditions.

The missionaries began complaints against Japanese state policy at the turn of the century by claiming that bowing to the portrait of the Emperor, as was frequently asked of them during school ceremonies, was “Caesar worship.” Their refusal was akin to the Jehovah’s Witnesses' refusal to salute the flag, which had caused them to be labeled traitors to the United States and frequently persecuted.  Nevertheless, the missionaries were convinced that their way was the only civilized way. The American Baptist perspective on this dispute was not merely that the Japanese had different customs from the missionaries, but that “there is evidently room for progress and enlightenment even among the advanced classes of Japan.”  But of course, they were not actually talking about technological or social “progress”, but about their own sectarian agendas, which they felt had not been sufficiently disseminated into the Japanese conscience. By the mid-1900s, however, this particular issue had died down. Bowing to the portrait was reconsidered as a patriotic duty, similar to saluting a flag.

In 1911, though, controversy flared up again when the Japanese government asked Christian schools to begin sending representatives of each class to a state shrine on an annual basis in order to pay their respects to those who gave their lives for the empire.  Missionaries were concerned by this development, which seemed to them to violate the separation of church and state. Of course, the Japanese Christians grew up in a culture where families went to shrines together, newspapers talked about them, and the government built them for special occasions. They did not see shrines as alien or blasphemous to their Christian faith; they were rather an integral part of Japaneseness. Many Christians disagreed with the missionary perspective, and drew on familiar Japanese scholars to resolve the question: for example, in 1915 the Christian Tatsu Tanaka (1868-1920) published a book entitled My Opinion of Shintō which cited dozens of authors to prove that the shintō of the modern shrines was non-religious.  They won over not only other Japanese but also some Western hearts during frequent discussions and meetings on the subject, such as the missionary R.C. Armstrong (1876-1929), who beginning in 1916 agreed that “the Japanese are justified in saying that Shintō is not a religion” and advocated for Christians to continue employing shrine priests in secular ceremonies. 

In 1918, Armstrong expanded on his opinion with a theory of “Shintō as a National Cult,” where he considered the nonsectarian and national value of the shrines:

We stand in a transition period in Japan: the fight over the homage and the adoration of the Imperial photograph has been fought, but it has been interpreted in a manner to give offence to no right thinking man, who understands that all of these patriotic ceremonies are nothing but the embodiment of the national spirit of reverence for the Imperial ancestors of the Japanese people. In this sense, bowing before the national shrines may be interpreted. It is not unlike our action in removing our hats in the presence of, and out of respect for the dead. 

Armstrong still had some misgivings: he did not like the “foxes and other animals” which stood inside the gates of some shrines, and looked forward to a stricter government separation between religious and secular activities. But in general, he saw Christianity as a fulfillment of traditional shintō culture, and not a rival threatened by it. 

On the Japanese side, too, there were some goodwill attempts being made at a compromise with Christian qualms. In 1919, the shrine priest Kiyosuke Yasuhara published a book entitled Shrines and Religion. Yasuhara considered that while some kami were relatives, ancestors or other historical individuals, other kami had weak historical grounding and seemed closer akin to characters of folklore or mythology. To resolve this he proposed that lists of religious and non-religious kami be drawn up, and that some shrines could be granted the ability to reorganize as a religion, while others could remain secular and be purged of any “religious” influence.  Several religious organizations for private shrines already existed, e.g. Shintō Honkyoku for shrines associated with the restoration movement, and Shintō Taiseikyō for more eclectic shrines; beginning in the 1920s, some religiously oriented shrines were privatized and moved into these groups. 

Writers such as Armstrong and Yasuhara suggest a route the Shrine Bureau could have taken to answer the Christians’ qualms. By reforming their mandates for enshrinements and prayers to match Western expectations for secularity, they could acknowledge and respond to the Christian position without doing too much damage to Japanese customs. But unlike the issue of the imperial photograph, the shrine question was not going away that easily. Among the missionaries there were many who saw “Shintō” as a monolithic entity that could not be reformed. They simply could not see how something that had been described as religion from the earliest accounts of foreign visitors could be reformed into something non-religious. As early as November 1916, a Christian association concluded after two years of debate that shrine attendance could not be permitted. 

To make matters worse, the Japanese authorities seemed uninterested in internal Christian arguments, and did not take much of an effort to respond to them. Their solution to the problem of religiousness was to purposefully refrain from defining shrines, so that people could interpret them however they wanted.  A statement of the Home Ministry, which managed the Shrine Bureau, affirms this solution: “Whatever opinion may be held as to what should be done regarding religious attitudes toward the shrines, the government will maintain a neutral position on the ground that religious belief should be free.”  When the government finally established a committee to discuss religious problems surrounding the shrines in the 1920s, it did not involve Christians in its discussion but put off their complaints for later. One of the few officials who did answer the Christians offered this explanation:

Although the word kami continues to be used in the national cult, it has in no way the meaning of a supernatural being, which you give to it. It connotes only illustrious men, benefactors of their country. Consequently all Japanese, no matter what their religion, can pay them honour without doing violence to their conscience. … I have no doubt that you will willingly consent to enlighten your followers and to confirm their patriotism and loyalty towards the Emperor. 

This response contains a good amount of truth, since kami often are human beings, and the aim of government policies was indeed to induce “patriotism and loyalty,” not to convert Japanese away from Christianity. But in his flat-out denial that any religious complaint could be made, the governor also indicates a reluctance to address the Christian perspective, or to make a compromise with them as Yasuhara’s proposals would have done. Perhaps the official was considering such factors as widespread approval of the government uses of shrines, the strong association between patriotic feeling and the preservation of ancient traditions, or Christianity’s insignificance and powerlessness within Japanese society as a whole.

Overview of D.C. Holtom’s Work

An anthropological analysis of the situation at this point would have framed it as a stand-off between the Christians and the Japanese. To the overwhelming majority of Japanese, shrine attendance was unproblematic; indeed, as late as 1936 an outside observer concluded that “whatever their religious beliefs,” all Japanese citizens were capable of participating in state ceremonies, and “Christianity alone seemed to conflict.”  One of these conflicting Christians was Daniel Clarence Holtom (1884-1962), who was initially sent to Japan by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society in the early 1910s and continued to live there as a religious scholar through the 1940s, teaching at Japan Baptist Theological Seminary and lecturing at various universities. In 1922, he submitted a Ph.D. dissertation to the University of Chicago entitled The Political Philosophy of Modern Shintō: A Study of the State Religion of Japan. This work initiates a line of argument which remains constant throughout Holtom’s work, even into the postwar period.

Within Holtom’s major works are two narratives. The first will ring a bell for students of Japanese history on either side of the Pacific: he discusses such major philosophical figures as Kūkai and Saichō in the early ninth century (who had unified kami with Buddhas) and Norinaga Motoori and Atsutane Hirata in the early nineteenth century, explaining the influence of all of these figures on the development of the concept of kami. He then goes into the important restoration campaign of 1868-1872 as well as the lesser-known Shintō-Buddhist combined campaign of 1873-1875, both of which attempted to create a sense of pan-Japanese unity and obedience to the state. In this history, kami is a complicated subject, related to such ideas as Buddha, Emperor, spirit and heart, that changes over time in response to the social and political currents of Japanese history. 

At the same time, a teleological narrative, which contradicts this history, dominates his work. According to the history as described by Holtom himself, to put it simply, kami is a term that has developed over time. But in the other narrative, kami is an undeveloped concept: it is a “primitive religion” which should be irrelevant to “the vital interests of intelligent men in the modern world.”  Although Holtom does not accept Shintō-influenced government as legitimately modern, he occasionally intimates that if it were to conform to his teleological path, a “modern”, Western-style religion would eventually appear.

Holtom begins his book Modern Japan and Shintō Nationalism (1943) not with a description of the history of Japanese nationalist movements, but with a presentation of the evolution of religion from its primitive state to the modern, advanced state typified by Christianity. He questions “our essentially sound conviction that religion ought somehow to have a more vital adjustment to contemporary social life than that reached through dogma and theology,” lumping this belief in with things such as “Christmas trees ... Santa Claus ... fairies and elves, our names for the days of the week” and calling all these things the “outmoded” remnants of “communal folk religions.” He claims that because of the saving sacrifice of Christ, religion has progressed beyond “the primitive way of life”, and today represents the fulfillment of all its promises in “the new loyalties of an uncompromising and at the same time universalizing monotheism.” 

In this passage, the word “universalizing” is put in contrast to the “communal”. What is being universalized? From the examples given, it appears that Holtom holds in his mind an idealized Christianity, which he would like to see both believed and practiced the same way around the world—with Christmas trees and Santa Claus representing profane, tribal remnants of our pre-monotheistic culture. His preference for Christianity is not only made explicit but put in stark contrast to every heathen idea he can think of, including the belief that religion (not just Christianity) should reflect social norms rather than the other way around. His definition of what makes religion good is therefore clearly grounded in this rejection of socially grounded religion and preference for universalist teachings. Assigning the positive value to the universal, he dismisses the communal as its antithesis. From this passage he jumps directly into his representation of Japanese society: “The old communal form of religion that was normal in the West two thousand years ago exists in Japan as a powerful social and religious force.” 

Besides its Christian origins, this teleological narrative is theoretically grounded in evolutionary sociology of Émile Durkheim and the French anthropological school. Although Holtom does not explicitly make the connection, he derives his definition of religion from Durkheim and cites him in his dissertation.  Durkheim’s classic example of primitiveness is the Australian aboriginal claim that the sun is a white cockatoo, which he saw as a starting point on the “intellectual evolution of humanity.”  Thus, although he considered all humans to have the same capacity for development, the “primitive mind” remained for him intrinsically different from the “developed mind” and lacked at a cultural level most rational abilities.  Those holding a “primitive” worldview could not be entrusted with the rights and responsibilities of governing a modern state, for, according to one sociologist, “it was the mind of the primitive which, to Western observers of many kinds, was suspect above all.” 

But Holtom was not dealing with a preliterate, unreflective society that would submit easily to classification as “primitive”. On the contrary, the Japanese government was framing itself as secular and Western, and European powers had recognized this. The historical narrative which Holtom expounded shows that the category of kami, like other concepts in Japanese philosophy, had already been debated and discussed for hundreds of years, and that shrines had just recently undergone vast changes in structure that supposedly secularized them in the eyes of the ordinary Japanese citizen. As a polemicist, Holtom was therefore tasked with refuting the Japanese claims of secularity by demonstrating that their shrines were barbarous in both philosophy and execution, or in his own words, that they represented an “old communal form of religion” which he perceived to have been marginalized in civilized countries.

Searching for the Primitive

In searching for examples of the primitive nature of shrine culture, Holtom took advantage of ancient and medieval treatises which collectively demonstrated the changes which shrines and various kami had undergone throughout Japanese history. Although Holtom praised early modern interpreters of kami discourse such as Motoori and Hirata, he also considered the ancient records of kami to be both more “primitive” and more important than its modern reinterpretation and insisted that the earliest interpretations had only been covered over in folklore out of neglect, as stones are gradually covered in moss. In other words, he denies that these symbols might change over time, as a stone is hewn into a sculpture, and can become non-religious in function.

Holtom explains that the stories in the Kojiki, a quasi-historical text which is often used to provide a biography of enshrined kami, have their origins in “the magico-religious ceremonies of the savage” for primitive needs such as “protecting the food supply.” One individual example of this he gives is the kami Takemikazuchi, whom he interprets as a mythological fire god who has been “submerged in ancestor worship” in the shrines that honor him. All this means in practical terms is that the figure seen in the shrine is a human being, whose hagiography has probably changed over time. However, in Holtom’s narrative the beliefs of centuries past are more real than the present-day manifestation. 

To the Japanese themselves, such analysis is unimportant; neither the shrine keepers nor the visiting locals have any interest in psychoanalyzing the origin of Takemikazuchi. But recall that Holtom does not believe in allowing tradition to survive for its own sake, because he holds Westernized cultures to the “higher” standard of monotheism. Therefore, such disinterest is a flaw in the Japanese character. In Modern Japan, he charitably attributes this flaw to a political climate which encourages ignorance, but in National Faith, he explains more clinically that in “Japanese racial psychology,” “strong emotional factors operate to subordinate objective historical data ... to the felt needs of group solidarity and continuity.” 

Sources of Authority

This condescending attitude towards participants in the culture is not limited to his readings of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, but applies generally to his perception of shrines under the imperial system. One way to defend Holtom’s approach to Shintō and shrine policy would be to claim that he is simply putting the practices of the Japanese into a form that can be easily understood by English speakers. However, much of what Holtom does is to deny the narratives and analogies of other participants in Japanese life: Japanese Christians, government authorities, and even American missionaries. To show that his interpretation is superior to theirs, Holtom employs a combination of Orientalist discourse and appeals to allegedly intrinsic transcendental symbols which might be found in shrines.

In 1942, Holtom wrote a series of articles for The Christian Century in which he sought to reassure a general Christian audience that what they had heard from their Japanese compatriots was false, biased information: “Many of the statements regarding this issue, especially those from Japanese sources, Christian included, represent the propaganda interests of the Japanese government rather than the conclusions that flow from unbiased historical study.”  In other words, the Japanese themselves, both Christians and scholars, have not recognized the true nature of their shrines, their histories, or even their own government. It is up to Holtom to both uncover the conspiracy which the Japanese could not recognize and determine what is scientific and what is falsehood. Edward Said recognized a similar current in Middle Eastern studies: “The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself.”  

Said’s theory does not apply exactly here, because Holtom’s enemy is not all Japanese, nor is it even all Shintō scholars. It is only those who side with the government account whom he places in opposition to “historical study”. He gives a prominent voice to scholars such as Genchi Katō who regarded Shintō as the national religion of Japan, and mystics such as the Religious Shintō leaders who regard the kami as a private source of faith. Although their work was regarded by the Japanese government as “the private opinions of individuals,”  for Holtom they represent the true nature of Shintō.

It was common when discussing the shrine question to draw analogies between the shrines and Western institutions. For example, a Japanese Christian, Toyohiko Kagawa (1888-1960), wrote that “the shrines of state Shintō are the monuments and tombs of men who have rendered conspicuous service for the state. In this respect they differ not at all from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and the Cenotaph in London.”  Holtom acknowledges the frequency of these analogies, but does not portray them neutrally as part of the case made by the pro-Japanese side of the debate. Instead, he accuses their proponents of denying “the religious warmth of the Japanese people in their faith in the divine beings of these great shrines”.  In this response Holtom confusingly claims to be speaking for the true beliefs of the entire Japanese people, even though some of the authors he is attempting to refute are themselves Japanese. At the same time, by emphasizing this sanctity to create such a division, he also denies the “warmth” held by Westerners towards their own political heritage. But if the reader is compelled by his arguments, then the resulting conclusion must be that the government has mandated a state religion.

“State Shintō”

The result of this discourse defines what Holtom calls State Shintō, the “national faith” of Japan. Holtom did not use the term “State Shintō” in his dissertation, because no Japanese source used it. He first published it in the 1930 Japan Christian Year Book, and expanded on it in The National Faith of Japan. In the political history outlined in the latter book, Holtom portrays the shrine system as a modern invention, based on ample evidence: the prior work of the restoration movement, the novel separation of kami from Buddhas, and so forth. However, he ignores the modern arguments of the Japanese government that these inventions made the resulting system non-religious in nature. Instead, he employs the second narrative of the shrine system, this one much more hypothetical and speculative, in which he critiques it as a primitive religion. He claims that “the establishment of Shintō as the state religion” occurred sometime “in the early part of the Meiji era”.  In terms of official declarations, he is simply rewriting history, because no such declaration was ever made, even during the brief restoration era. Such a statement also conflates the equally complex periods of the restoration campaign and the “moral” use of shrines. But when we learn what Holtom means by State Shintō, perhaps he is right after all.

Holtom’s list of the elements of State Shintō is an almost complete list of political institutions that gave structure to the Japanese nation. It seems to have begun with shrines alone, but Holtom included in his 1922 dissertation some tangents on other aspects of Japanese nationalism,  and by 1943 his State Shintō hit list had grown to include all things that missionaries had complaint with: the imperial portrait, the Imperial Rescript on Education, the traditional platforms on which these two things were often housed (kamidana), Imperial House Law, and the unscrupulous use of the classical imperial history text Nihon Shoki in children’s history textbooks. To consider these things “State Shintō” was solely up to Holtom, because as all later scholars have had to acknowledge, the Japanese government had never grouped these things together under any classification.  Conspicuously missing from this list are the Japanese flag, the national anthem, and the symbolic use of the nation’s military forces. Additionally, Holtom explicitly rejects the idea that national holidays were part of “State Shintō”.  This is probably because the United States had similar institutions.

Even in the wartime context, there was disagreement among other academics and missionaries over whether any of these things were even religious, much less part of a unified system called State Shintō. The issue of the imperial portrait, for example, had been resolved decades earlier; as for the textbooks, the 1941 Japan Christian Year Book reported on a campaign to introduce instruction in religion in Japanese schools, using the following choice of words: “The association has been urging the importance of religion in national education, and attacking the existing separation of religion from education.” 

Unlike the Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850-1935), who seemed to call Japanese patriotism “the birth of a new religion” mostly for the purpose of analogy, Holtom was adamant that he was “not using the word ‘religion’ in a merely figurative sense” when he talked about Japan.  But this makes his definition of “State Shintō” bizarre to read: “The ideals of sacred obligations of loyalty to Emperor and Fatherland are inculcated as primary desiderata. The ethical motive of inspiring conduct conducive to good citizenship is dominant. In all these respects we find in State Shintō differentia that are accepted as characteristic in classifying so-called religious data from other fields. There is no good reason why we should make an exception in favor of State Shintō.”  This is simply a description of patriotism. There is nothing in this description that could not have been applied to England or Germany during the same time period. This also applies to the Durkheimian definition that he uses for “religion”: “a unified system of belief and practice relative to sacred things—whether persons, objects, or beliefs.” 

Holtom did not address this argument until 1945, when he conceded the point: “It would serve no useful purpose in our discussion to point out the extent to which these characteristics of Japanese nationalism have their counterparts in the West ... Certainly Japan has no monopoly of convictions of benevolent destiny ... It is certain that the whole world is one in the urgency of overcoming the devastating influences of exclusive, irrational, pre-scientific nationalism.” Instead of resting on this conclusion, though, he then exhorts the Allies to repair the Japanese mind to cooperate with something called the “world-spirit” (a secular spirit, undoubtedly): “At the same time it would be doubtful if any country will be called upon to make as thoroughgoing changes as would be needed for Japan to qualify for the possession of the true ‘world-spirit’.”  Why? Because Japan must develop a religion.

Fulfilling Shintō's Destiny

Within Holtom’s teleological narrative lies a prophesied outcome for this civilizing project, demonstrated by the unusual value he imbues in the term “Shintō”. In The National Faith of Japan, for example, Holtom claims that official assertions of secular government deny the “intrinsic nature of State Shintō”.  He claims, in other words, that the government is failing to address some religious element which lies behind its explicit wording. But can a government policy have an intrinsic nature behind its legal definition? How would Holtom like to see this intrinsic nature addressed and fulfilled?

In both National Faith and Modern Japan, he seems to provide an answer to this question. The former book contains lengthy descriptions of new religious movements such as Tenrikyō which were categorized as religious shintō, emphasizing especially the saintly lives of their founders and exploring the universal virtues they promote. The positive, almost poetic tone of these descriptions is markedly different from anything Holtom has to say about state policy. In the latter work, Holtom quotes from Tenrikyō foundress Oyasama and again remarks, “This is Shintō at its highest ... it is part of the all-pervading fire of the human soul and inspires the conviction that, in spite of the blighting effects of nationalism, there is still such a thing as universal human nature.”  This explicit avowal of a higher goodness shows that Holtom was imagining a future in which Shintō could be moved forwards on his teleological scale, away from the “old communal forms” and towards universality. Note that he conflates a private religious movement with public policy in the word “Shintō”: this is purposeful. Even if the current mandates are secular, Holtom believes that the shrine system of the future could and should mimic the Christian message and power structure.

This is how Holtom recognizes a “religious warmth” in patriotic ceremony, and why he regards State Shintō as possessing an “intrinsic nature”. Beyond the secularist policy, which he sees as a “blight” or an obfuscation, lies a non-political, Western-style religion which might be ranked alongside Christianity were it not for government interference.  When he claims that “the worth of Shintō to the world must depend on the success wherewith it is able to adjust itself to the demands of a true universalism”  (emphasis added), Holtom is asserting the truth of his theological project, and laying the ground for constructing a “Universal Shintō” which will join the ranks of the “world religions”.

Reception of Holtom’s Work

Holtom’s entire thesis was based on a Western category, religion, that did not exist in Japan before the Meiji Restoration, and he attempted to prove the applicability of this category by denying Japanese narratives and imposing his own narrative. His term “State Shintō” did not correspond to any Japanese entity, and his image of the future of shrines was based on his positive evaluation of new religious movements. Nevertheless, because of his unparalleled expertise and historical knowledge, he was received as an academic with insider knowledge of Japanese culture; he was considered an unbiased and reliable historian.  It is probable that no other English speaker knew more about the meanings of the word “kami” than he did, so his conclusions on the subject were taken quite seriously.

With the onset of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Holtom’s message was boiled down, along with that of other Japanologists, into increasingly hostile xenophobia. His condemnation of Japan’s “old communal form of religion” became a rhetorical weapon against the Japanese nation. In the American propaganda film “Our Enemy: The Japanese” (1943), we have the core of Holtom’s teleological analysis of Japanese culture delivered  to us by former U.S. ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew: “The real difference is in their minds ... Their weapons are modern, their thinking 2000 years out of date.” 

In his writings at the end of the war and afterwards, Holtom was forced to respond to the widespread perception he had helped to create that Shintō was an evil cult that had to be destroyed.  In February 1945, he portrayed this opinion as follows: “Can we discover any permanent values in Shintō? Or shall we anticipate a future for Japan in which the institution of the Tennō—‘The Son of Heaven’—is abolished, the shrines and all they stood for destroyed, and education divested of all traces of Shintō nationalism?” He also related that the America mass media had advocated for bombing the shrines.  In his answers to them, Holtom steps back from advocating for the destruction of his “State Shintō” outright. He points out that shrines are sacred to the Japanese people, and that their fascist use was only one development in a long history. He even advocates to keep Yasukuni Shrine a publicly owned institution, because he believed that privatizing it would “feed the flame of resentment and bitterness”. Unfortunately, his advice on this matter was ignored. 

In 1945, the American Occupation forces issued the Shintō Directive, citing Holtom’s work and employing the language of religious freedom. Yasukuni and other shrines were privatized and the photos of the Emperor in schools were removed, but the shrines were preserved, and they continue to be used in Japan for a rich variety of purposes. Many of these, such as paying respects to war dead, buying good-luck charms, or praying for health and success, continue traditions that already existed in the imperial period. While there are individual shrine priests who aim to imitate Christian preaching, an institutional move towards “true universalism” has not occurred in any meaningful sense. The institutions of the state, on the other hand, have been radically changed by the Shintō Directive. The Shrine Bureau became a private religious organization, and some (although not all) priests now consider themselves religious practitioners. However, the general population of Japan still believes shrines to be places of public custom and ceremony.  As a result, the Japanese Supreme Court has been faced with perilous cases such as a lawsuit filed in 1965 by a Communist Party leader against the city of Tsu for holding a ground-breaking ceremony (jichinsai) that employed a shrine priest, or one filed by residents of Ehime Prefecture to prevent its officials from sending money to Yasukuni Shrine. The court ruled for the local government in the first case, but against it in the latter, based on a fragile interpretation of when services become “religious” in nature and when they are purely social.  Additionally, several bills have been proposed to re-nationalize Yasukuni Shrine as a secular institution. The problem of church-state separation, which was an issue mainly for Christians before the war, has been further complicated by the privatization of shrines, which has legally alienated the Japanese people from their own culture.

A Way Forward

The general academic result of Holtom’s work is that fascism in Japan has been called in retrospect “State Shintō”, and has become the object of religious studies,  whereas fascism in Germany and Italy are considered mostly secular and are studied only in terms of history. In Japan, there is now a journalistic “State Shintō narrative” that attributes, rightly or wrongly, the performance of ground-breaking ceremonies, visits to Yasukuni, or money sent to Ise shrine to the legacy of a religious system that must be eradicated from Japanese politics.  In western academia, the use of the religious category has segregated European nationalist movements from the Japanese other. The general byproduct of this has been confusion over the meaning of Japanese nationalism, but some authors such as Walter Skya have attempted to recast the Pacific War itself as a clash of civilizations between “ethnic-religious nationalisms” and “Western-style secularized nationalisms”, with Imperial Japan representing a hotbed of “fanatical” and possibly “mentally deranged” “State Shintō ideology” pitted in unavoidable battle against the secular, rather than an ideologically and socially complex nation which was attempting to construct its own secularism. 

However, the entire theoretical grounding of Holtom’s polemic has meanwhile been uprooted. If examining Japan through the lens of an evolution on the path to Christianity was somewhat questionable in the 1930s, it is practically extinct now. Durkheim himself  abandoned his unilinear theory of religious/secular evolution later in life, acknowledging that perceived religious symbols preserve “collective sentiments” just as well in modern societies as they do in premodern ones.   As early as 1965, E. E. Evans-Pritchard was referring to Durkheim’s evolutionary sociology and theories of primitive religion in general as the “infancy” of anthropology, pointing out that the real distinction is not between primitive and civilized but between any two different ways of thinking.  The opportunity is ripe to reevaluate the imperial Japanese polity.

In such reexaminations, independent-minded sociologists have found reason to question Holtom’s picture of “State Shintō”. They claim that it distorts the religious freedom found throughout the imperial era to a “fanatical ‘cult’ of the emperor”,  or that it is an essentially meaningless term that is relevant only because of the Shintō Directive and resulting discourse.  This more modern work implies that citing Holtom uncritically will  induce some inaccuracies into even the most well-researched study.

Conclusion

D.C. Holtom’s work has had lasting influence on how the categories of Japanese politics and Japanese religion were determined in the second half of the 20th century. In fact, insofar as we can call the idea of “Japanese religion” an invented tradition, that is to say an idea foreign to Japan which has been given an ancient appearance,  Holtom can be given part of the credit for establishing this tradition in the academic world.

From an ecumenical perspective, Holtom’s intentions were just as good as any modern religious scholar. He wanted to see a Japan that could move forward within his teleological narrative, a nation that could someday impress the Western world with earnest devotion to a “pure” monotheism unmarred by nationalist fervor. It is not his fault that he lived in an age when the line between ethnography and evangelism was as blurry as has been described here. Although we are more familiar with the problem now, our moral standards are not that different from his, and confronting the dogmas hidden within our “secular” ethnographies has proven no less challenging. The modern sociologist Tomoko Masuzawa recognizes this:

Missionaries’ views and opinions were informed and predetermined by dogmatic Christianity, so it is said, and such religiously biased observations are palpably at odds with the principle of scientific objectivity and impartiality. This commonplace assessment of the missionary ethnography largely ignores, though it does not necessarily deny, that there is a significant continuity between “prescientific” ethnographic writings and later, academically certified anthropologists’ studies, especially with regard to the position of the observer and the style of notation. 

We undoubtedly have an impulse in modern academia to place subjects within our own teleological narratives. The perception of undercurrents within foreign societies that resemble our own passions brings the Other closer to us and gives us hope for a future reconciliation of our differences. Yet at the same time, emphasizing these perceptions at the expense of the subject’s self-identity can cause misunderstandings in the present day. If it is only those perceived undercurrents within a society which we find to contain a seed of civilization, does that not mean that we have concluded the society at large to be primitive and ignorant? Anthropologists and historians have long understood that political and social choices which may appear primitive to us are the product of cultural history. The only way to write a non-polemical study is to take that history into account.

We must acknowledge the influence of these narratives when studying modern social  movements that have been caught in the web of “religion”. We may want to regard this category as neutral with respect to the concerns outlined above, but the changes it brings to social discourse are anything but neutral. When we categorize the Hindu nationalist movement as “religious”, as Holtom did for “State Shintō”, what sort of consequences does that have on the way we talk about it? Does it enable people to dismiss Hindutva concerns as the product of an “old communal form of religion”, or to characterize them as ignorant nationalists who know nothing about the universalist and nonpolitical essence of “their religion”? Does it allow an American Sanskritist whose area of expertise is 8th century Indian manuscripts to make claims about the legitimacy of a modern political movement in a country she has never lived in, and be taken seriously? How do these things help or hinder understanding of Indian politics within and without India, and what real consequences might they have in terms of organizational, national, or international policy? The forces at play here are not much different from the ones prominent in D.C. Holtom’s day.

Timothy Fitzgerald has claimed that the religious and secular are not permanent, natural fixtures in the cultural landscape of all places and times. Instead, he argues that they are “rhetorical categories which have proved useful for certain groups of people with particular objectives and values at specific points in history, and ... that they therefore do not provide an ‘objective’ account of what is in the world.”  I believe to have demonstrated, in close accordance with his hypothesis, that D.C. Holtom did not employ the category of “religion” in an objective manner in his analysis of Japanese culture, but that his work rather presents itself as an ideological use of religious studies.

Bibliography

Ama Toshimaro. Why Are the Japanese Non-Religious? Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005.

Armstrong, Robert Cornell. "The Religious Value of Shintō." In The Japan Evangelist 23.11 (November 1916), pp.429-433 .

——. "Shintō as a National Cult". In Edwin Taylor Iglehart (ed.) The Christian Movement in the Japanese Empire ... A Year Book for 1918. Tokyo: Fukuin Printing Co., 1918.

Breen, John. "Ideologues, Bureaucrats and Priests." In Breen and Teeuwen, Shintō in History.

Breen, John and Mark Teeuwen. Shintō in History: Ways of the Kami. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990.

Burns, Susan L. Before the Nation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Chamberlain, Basil Hall. “The Invention of a New Religion.” London: Watts and Co, 1912.

Chamberlain had claimed in an earlier book that National Teaching ended the religious period of Japanese nationalism. But here he claims that some kind of “religion” is resurgent. He does not define “religion” so his use of the term may have been figurative.

Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: George Allen, 1976.

Dyke, Ken R. “Shinto: A Study Prepared by General Headquarters, SCAP, C I & E Section”. Contemporary Religions in Japan 7.4 (1966)

Evans (?), J.D.  The National Cult in Japan (Kobe: Japan Chronicle, 1918)

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.

Fenton, Steve. Durkheim and Modern Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1984.

Fitzgerald, Timothy. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2000.

——. Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations. London: Equinox, 2007.

——. Discourse on Civility and Barbarity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Goodman, Carl F. The Rule of Law in Japan. Fredrick, MD: Kluwer Law International, 2008.

Hardacre, Helen. Shintō and the State, 1868-1988. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1989.

Haring, Douglas H. “Daniel Clarence Holtom 1884-1962”. American Anthropologist 65.4 (1963).

Hess, Andreas. Concepts of Social Stratification: European and American Models. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Holtom, Daniel Clarence. The Political Philosophy of Modern Shintō: A Study of the State Religion of Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1922.

——.  "Review: The Religions of Japan in the Hastings 'Encyclopaedia'". The Journal of Religion 3.2 (1923).

Holtom was not the greatest fan of fellow Japanologist W.G. Aston, who saw state shrines as non-religious. In a later book he seems to rewrite Aston’s views.

——. “A New Interpretation of Japanese Mythology and Its Bearing on the Ancestral Theory of Shintō”. The Journal of Religion 6.1 (1926).

——. “The Christian Message and Shintō”. Japan Christian Quarterly, July 1927.

——. “The State Cult of Modern Japan”. The Journal of Religion 7.4 (1927).

Although this is a complete discussion of “religiousness” with regards to the national shrine system, the term “State Shintō” is not used; he has not invented it yet.

——. “Modern Shintō as a State Religion.” In Paul S. Mayer (ed.), The Japan Mission Year Book, vol. 28. Tokyo: Kyobunkwan, 1930.

——. “Recent Discussion Regarding State Shintō.” In Luman J. Schafer (ed.), The Japan Mission Year Book, vol. 29. Tokyo: Kyobunkwan, 1931.

——. “Japanese Christianity and Shintō Nationalism.” The Christian Century, January 7, 1942.

——. “Shrine Worship and the Gods.” The Christian Century, January 14, 1942.

——. “The Sacred Emperor.” The Christian Century, February 11, 1942.

——. “Shintō in the Postwar World.” Far Eastern Survey 14.3 (February 1945), 29

This article defends state shrines; an interesting change in tone.

——. “The Japanese Mind.” The New Republic, May 28, 1945.

With claims like “Buddhist pessimism accentuates primitive impersonality” and references to “false gods”, this article seems to reflect Holtom’s missionary attitude. This does not prevent Haring from listing it as a work of “ethnography”.

——. Modern Japan and Shintō Nationalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947.

Ion, A. Hamish. The Cross in the Dark Valley: The Canadian Protestant Missionary Movement in Japan. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier, 1999.

Isomae Jun'ichi. “Deconstructing 'Japanese Religion'”. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 32.2 (2005).

——. “The Formative Process of State Shintō in Relation to the Westernization of Japan: the Concept of ‘Religion’ and ‘Shintō’.” In Fitzgerald, Religion and the Secular, 2007.

Kagawa Toyohiko. Christ and Japan. William Axling (tr.) New York: Friendship Press, 1934.

——. "The Church and Present Trends." In Charles W. Iglehart (ed.), The Japan Christian Year Book. Tokyo: Kyobunkwan, 1938.

Ketelaar, James Edward, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Ko Wŏn-Sŏp. Panminnja Choesanggi (A record of charges against the anti-nationalists). Seoul: Paegyŏp Munhwasa, 1949.

In postwar Korea, a half-dozen ministers who believed in the non-conflict of shrine attendance with Christianity were arrested for pro-Japanese activism, beginning in 1949. The Korean church issued a statement that “since all church leaders participated in Shintō worship, they have to purify themselves through penitence before engaging in church activities.” Of course, among Japanese Christians there was no such call for penitence. Declaring the shrines an abhorrent expression of paganism was a political move which reoriented Korean Christianity with national interests.

Kojima Aiko, “Religion or Civil Religion as the Basis of Nationalism?: State Shintō Plan and National Moral in Meiji Japan”. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, Aug 14, 2004. 

Koremaru Sakamoto, “Thoughts on State Shintō Research” (国家神道研究をめぐる断想), in Kinsei Kindai Shintō Ronkou (近世・近代神道論考). Tokyo: Kōbundō, 2007.

Kuroda Toshio, James C. Dobbins and Suzanne Gay. “Shintō in the History of Japanese Religion”. Journal of Japanese Studies 7.1 (1981).

Lee, Kun Sam. The Christian Confrontation with Shintō Nationalism. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1966.

Masuzawa Tomoko, “Culture”, in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

——. The Invention of World Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

McNair, Theodore N. “Modern Japan as a Mission Field.” In Arthur T. Pierson (ed.), The Missionary Review of the World 23. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1900.

Mossman, Samuel. New Japan: The Land of the Rising Sun. London: John Murray, 1873.

Nitta Hitoshi. "Shintō as a 'Non-Religion'". In Breen and Teeuwen, Shintō in History.

——. The Illusion of "Arahitogami" "Kokkashintou". Tokyo: PHP Kenkyūjo, 2003.

This is a study of the Japanese side of the debate which future research could find extremely useful. Unfortunately because of my limited Japanese knowledge I was only able to briefly skim its contents.

“Our Enemy: The Japanese”. United States Office of War Information, 1943.

Peters, Shawn Francis. Judging Jehovah's Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution. Lawrence, KS: University Press Of Kansas, 2000.

Picken, Stuart D.B. Sourcebook in Shintō: Selected Documents. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Said, Edward, Orientalism. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Sica, Morris G. “The School Flag Movement: Origin and Influence.”  Social Education 54.6 (1990). pp.380-84.

A point that might be made in future studies: While the Japanese flag was distributed by the government and poorly received in local communities in the late 19th century, the American flag was being pressed onto Congress by a grassroots patriotic movement.

Scott, J.W.R. The Foundations of Japan. New York: Appleton and Co., 1922.

Skya, Walter. Japan’s Holy War. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

Woodard, William P. “The Foreign Missionary in Japan.” In Charles W. Iglethart (ed.), The Japan Christian Year Book. Tokyo: Kyobunkwan, 1940.

Woodard spent much of his life preparing his 1972 book. This short submission to the Year Book demonstrates his keen eye for detail in describing the missionary climate in Japan on the eve of the Pacific War.

——. The Allied Occupation of Japan and Japanese Religions. New York: Brill, 1972.

Woodard refutes the idea that “State Shintō” was non-religious based on the legal point that shrines and sects were managed by the same local bureaus, rather than discussing the Christian shrine debate in full. But this is only an appendix to his unbiased and complete book on the postwar situation, which I am indebted to.

인류세 - 위키백과, Anthropocene

인류세 - 위키백과, 우리 모두의 백과사전

인류세
위키백과, 우리 모두의 백과사전.


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인류세(人類世, Anthropocene) 또는 인신세(人新世)는 제안된 지질 시대로, 홀로세(현세) 중에서 인류가 지구 환경에 큰 영향을 미친 시점부터를 별개의 세로 개념이다.[1] 정확한 시점은 합의되지 않은 상태이지만 대기의 변화를 기준으로 할 경우 산업 혁명이 그 기준이다.[2] 절대다수의 층서학자는 미래에 별개의 지질 시대로 볼 수 있을지 결정되어야 한다는 입장이지만 여러 지질학회에 속한 다른 학자들은 언젠가 인류세가 독립된 지질 시대로 공인될 것으로 전망한다.[3] 인류세의 개념은 노벨 화학상을 받은 대기화학자 파울 크뤼천이 대중화시켰다.

인류세를 주장하는 사람들은 첫 번째 핵실험이 실시된 1945년을 인류세의 시작점으로 본다. 인류세를 대표하는 물질들로는 방사능 물질, 대기 중의 이산화탄소, 플라스틱, 콘크리트 등을 꼽는다. 심지어는 한 해 600억 마리가 소비되는 닭고기의 닭뼈를 인류세의 최대 지질학적 특징으로 꼽기도 한다. 인류세 지지자인 얀 잘라시에비치는 “테크노스피어는 지질학적으로 어리지만 놀라운 속도로 진화해가고 있다. 이미 우리 행성에 깊은 자국을 남겼다.”고 말했다.[4]
각주[편집]

↑ EBS 다큐프라임 - Docuprime_인류세
↑ Zalasiewicz, J.; 외. (2008). “Are we now living in the Anthropocene” (PDF). 《GSA Today》 18 (2): 4–8. doi:10.1130/GSAT01802A.1. 2011년 7월 22일에 원본 문서 (PDF)에서 보존된 문서. 2011년 6월 20일에 확인함.
↑ Zalasiewicz, J.; 외. (2010). “The New World of the Anthropocene”. 《Environment Science & Technology》 44 (7): 2228–2231. doi:10.1021/es903118j.
↑ http://m.news.naver.com/hotissue/read.nhn?sid1=105&cid=948224&iid=34262020&oid=028&aid=0002360228
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Anthropocene
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For the documentary film, see Anthropocene: The Human Epoch.
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The Anthropocene (/ˈæn.θrə.pəˌsin, ænˈθrɒp.ə-/ AN-thrə-pə-seen, an-THROP-ə-)[1][2][3][failed verification] is a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change.[4][5][6][7][8]

As of September 2021, neither the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) nor the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) has officially approved the term as a recognised subdivision of geologic time,[6][9][10] although the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) of the ICS voted in April 2016 to proceed towards a formal golden spike (GSSP) proposal to define the Anthropocene epoch in the geologic time scale (GTS) and presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in August 2016.[11] In May 2019, the AWG voted in favour of submitting a formal proposal to the ICS by 2021,[12] locating potential stratigraphic markers to the mid-twentieth century of the common era.[13][12][14] This time period coincides with the start of the Great Acceleration, a post-WWII time period during which socioeconomic and Earth system trends increase at a dramatic rate,[15] and the Atomic Age.

Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution 12,000–15,000 years ago, to as recently as the 1960s. The ratification process is still ongoing, and thus a date remains to be decided definitively, but the peak in radionuclides fallout consequential to atomic bomb testing during the 1950s has been more favoured than others, locating a possible beginning of the Anthropocene to the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, or the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.[12]


Contents
1General
2Etymology
3Nature of human effects
3.1Homogenocene
3.2Biodiversity
3.3Biogeography and nocturnality
3.4Climate
3.5Geomorphology
3.6Stratigraphy
3.6.1Sedimentological record
3.6.2Fossil record
3.6.3Trace elements
4Temporal limit
4.1"Early anthropocene" model
4.2Antiquity
4.3European colonization of the Americas
4.4Industrial Revolution
4.5Great Acceleration
4.6Anthropocene markers
5In culture
5.1Humanities
5.2Popular culture
6See also
7References
8Further reading
9External links
General[edit]

An early concept for the Anthropocene was the Noosphere by Vladimir Vernadsky, who in 1938 wrote of "scientific thought as a geological force".[16] Scientists in the Soviet Union appear to have used the term "anthropocene" as early as the 1960s to refer to the Quaternary, the most recent geological period.[17] Ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer subsequently used "anthropocene" with a different sense in the 1980s[18] and the term was widely popularised in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen,[19] who regards the influence of human behavior on Earth's atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological epoch.

In 2008, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London considered a proposal to make the Anthropocene a formal unit of geological epoch divisions.[6][20] A majority of the commission decided the proposal had merit and should be examined further. Independent working groups of scientists from various geological societies have begun to determine whether the Anthropocene will be formally accepted into the Geological Time Scale.[21]



The pressures we exert on the planet have become so great that scientists are considering whether the Earth has entered an entirely new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, or the age of humans. It means that we are the first people to live in an age defined by human choice, in which the dominant risk to our survival is ourselves.

—Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator[22]

The term "anthropocene" is informally used in scientific contexts.[23] The Geological Society of America entitled its 2011 annual meeting: Archean to Anthropocene: The past is the key to the future.[24] The new epoch has no agreed start-date, but one proposal, based on atmospheric evidence, is to fix the start with the Industrial Revolution c. 1780, with the invention of the steam engine.[20][25] Other scientists link the new term to earlier events, such as the rise of agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution (around 12,000 years BP). Evidence of relative human impact – such as the growing human influence on land use, ecosystems, biodiversity, and species extinction – is substantial; scientists think that human impact has significantly changed (or halted) the growth of biodiversity.[26][27][28][29][30] Those arguing for earlier dates posit that the proposed Anthropocene may have begun as early as 14,000–15,000 years BP, based on geologic evidence; this has led other scientists to suggest that "the onset of the Anthropocene should be extended back many thousand years";[31]: 1  this would make the Anthropocene essentially synonymous with the current term, Holocene.

The Trinity test in July 1945 has been proposed as the start of the Anthropocene.

In January 2015, 26 of the 38 members of the International Anthropocene Working Group published a paper suggesting the Trinity test on 16 July 1945 as the starting point of the proposed new epoch.[32] However, a significant minority supports one of several alternative dates.[32] A March 2015 report suggested either 1610 or 1964 as the beginning of the Anthropocene.[33] Other scholars point to the diachronous character of the physical strata of the Anthropocene, arguing that onset and impact are spread out over time, not reducible to a single instant or date of start.[34]

A January 2016 report on the climatic, biological, and geochemical signatures of human activity in sediments and ice cores suggested the era since the mid-20th century should be recognised as a geological epoch distinct from the Holocene.[35]

The Anthropocene Working Group met in Oslo in April 2016 to consolidate evidence supporting the argument for the Anthropocene as a true geologic epoch.[36] Evidence was evaluated and the group voted to recommend "Anthropocene" as the new geological epoch in August 2016.[11] Should the International Commission on Stratigraphy approve the recommendation, the proposal to adopt the term will have to be ratified by the IUGS before its formal adoption as part of the geologic time scale.[10]

In April 2019, the Anthropocene Working Group announced that they would vote on a formal proposal to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, to continue the process started at the 2016 meeting.[14] In May 2019, 29 members of the 34 person AWG panel voted in favour of an official proposal to be made by 2021. The AWG also voted with 29 votes in favour of a starting date in the mid 20th century. Ten candidate sites for a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point have been identified, one of which will be chosen to be included in the final proposal.[12][13] Possible markers include microplastics, heavy metals, or the radioactive nuclei left by tests from thermonuclear weapons.[37]
Etymology[edit]

The name Anthropocene is a combination of anthropo- from the Ancient Greek ἄνθρωπος (anthropos) meaning 'human' and -cene from καινός (kainos) meaning 'new' or 'recent'.[38][39]

As early as 1873, the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani acknowledged the increasing power and effect of humanity on the Earth's systems and referred to an 'anthropozoic era'.[40]

Although the biologist Eugene F. Stoermer is often credited with coining the term anthropocene, it was in informal use in the mid-1970s. Paul J. Crutzen is credited with independently re-inventing and popularising it. Stoermer wrote, "I began using the term 'anthropocene' in the 1980s, but never formalised it until Paul contacted me."[41] Crutzen has explained, "I was at a conference where someone said something about the Holocene. I suddenly thought this was wrong. The world has changed too much. So I said: 'No, we are in the Anthropocene.' I just made up the word on the spur of the moment. Everyone was shocked. But it seems to have stuck."[42]: 21 [43] In 2008, Zalasiewicz suggested in GSA Today that an anthropocene epoch is now appropriate.[20]
Nature of human effects[edit]
Main article: Human impact on the environment
Homogenocene[edit]

Homogenocene (from old Greek: homo-, same; geno-, kind; kainos-, new;) is a more specific term used to define our current geological epoch, in which biodiversity is diminishing and biogeography and ecosystems around the globe seem more and more similar to one another mainly due to invasive species that have been introduced around the globe either on purpose (crops, livestock) or inadvertently. This is due to the newfound globalism that humans participate in, as species traveling across the world to another region was not as easily possible in any point of time in history as it is today.[44]

The term Homogenocene was first used by Michael Samways in his editorial article in the Journal of Insect Conservation from 1999 titled "Translocating fauna to foreign lands: Here comes the Homogenocene."[45]

The term was used again by John L. Curnutt in the year 2000 in Ecology, in a short list titled "A Guide to the Homogenocene",[46] which reviewed Alien species in North America and Hawaii: impacts on natural ecosystems by George Cox. Charles C. Mann, in his acclaimed book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, gives a bird's-eye view of the mechanisms and ongoing implications of the homogenocene.[47]
Biodiversity[edit]

Forest Landscape Integrity Index showing anthropogenic modification of remaining forest.[48]
Main articles: Holocene extinction and Biodiversity loss

The human impact on biodiversity forms one of the primary attributes of the Anthropocene.[49] Humankind has entered what is sometimes called the Earth's sixth major extinction.[50][51][52][53][54][55] Most experts agree that human activities have accelerated the rate of species extinction.[28][56] The exact rate remains controversial – perhaps 100 to 1000 times the normal background rate of extinction.[57][58] A 2010 study found that


marine phytoplankton – the vast range of tiny algae species accounting for roughly half of Earth's total photosynthetic biomass – has declined substantially in the world's oceans over the past century. From 1950 alone, algal biomass decreased by around 40%, probably in response to ocean warming[59]

– and that the decline had gathered pace in recent years.[59] Some authors have postulated that without human impacts the biodiversity of the planet would continue to grow at an exponential rate.[26]

Increases in global rates of extinction have been elevated above background rates since at least 1500, and appear to have accelerated in the 19th century and further since.[5] A New York Times op-ed on 13 July 2012 by ecologist Roger Bradbury predicted the end of biodiversity for the oceans, labelling coral reefs doomed: "Coral reefs will be the first, but certainly not the last, major ecosystem to succumb to the Anthropocene."[60] This op-ed quickly generated much discussion among conservationists; The Nature Conservancy rebutted Bradbury on its website, defending its position of protecting coral reefs despite continued human impacts causing reef declines.[61]

In a pair of studies published in 2015, extrapolation from observed extinction of Hawaiian snails of the family Amastridae, led to the conclusion that "the biodiversity crisis is real", and that 7% of all species on Earth may have disappeared already.[62][63] Human predation was noted as being unique in the history of life on Earth as being a globally distributed 'superpredator', with predation of the adults of other apex predators and with widespread impact on food webs worldwide.[64] A study published in May 2017 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted that a "biological annihilation" akin to a sixth mass extinction event is underway as a result of anthropogenic causes. The study suggested that as much as 50% of animal individuals that once lived on Earth are already extinct.[65][66] A different study published in PNAS in May 2018 says that since the dawn of human civilization, 83% of wild mammals have disappeared. Today, livestock makes up 60% of the biomass of all mammals on earth, followed by humans (36%) and wild mammals (4%).[67][68] According to the 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services by IPBES, 25% of plant and animal species are threatened with extinction.[69][70][71] According to the World Wildlife Fund's 2020 Living Planet Report, 68% of wildlife populations have declined between 1970 and 2016 as a result of overconsumption, population growth and intensive farming, and the report asserts that "the findings are clear. Our relationship with nature is broken."[72][73] However, a 2020 study disputed the findings of the Living Planet Report, finding that the 68% decline number was being influenced down by a very small amount extreme outliers and when these were not included, the decline was less steep, or even stable if other outliers were not included.[74] A 2021 paper published in Frontiers in Conservation Science, which cites both of the aforementioned studies, says "population sizes of vertebrate species that have been monitored across years have declined by an average of 68% over the last five decades, with certain population clusters in extreme decline, thus presaging the imminent extinction of their species."[75]
Biogeography and nocturnality[edit]
Main article: Biogeography

Permanent changes in the distribution of organisms from human influence will become identifiable in the geologic record. Researchers have documented the movement of many species into regions formerly too cold for them, often at rates faster than initially expected.[76] This has occurred in part as a result of changing climate, but also in response to farming and fishing, and to the accidental introduction of non-native species to new areas through global travel.[5] The ecosystem of the entire Black Sea may have changed during the last 2000 years as a result of nutrient and silica input from eroding deforested lands along the Danube River.[77][78]

Researchers have found that the growth of the human population and expansion of human activity has resulted in many species of animals that are normally active during the day, such as elephants, tigers and boars, becoming nocturnal to avoid contact with humans.[79][78]
Climate[edit]
Main articles: Anthropogenic climate change and Anthropocene extinction

One geological symptom resulting from human activity is increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO
2) content. During the glacial–interglacial cycles of the past million years, natural processes have varied CO
2 by approximately 100 ppm (from 180 ppm to 280 ppm)[80] As of 2013, anthropogenic net emissions of CO
2 have increased atmospheric concentration by a comparable amount: From 280 ppm (Holocene or pre-industrial "equilibrium") to approximately 400 ppm,[81] with 2015–2016 monthly monitoring data of CO
2 displaying a rising trend above 400 ppm.[80] This signal in the Earth's climate system is especially significant because it is occurring much faster,[82] and to a greater extent, than previous, similar changes. Most of this increase is due to the combustion of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas, although smaller fractions result from cement production and from land-use changes (such as deforestation).
Geomorphology[edit]

Changes in drainage patterns traceable to human activity will persist over geologic time in large parts of the continents where the geologic regime is erosional. This involves, for example, the paths of roads and highways defined by their grading and drainage control. Direct changes to the form of the Earth's surface by human activities (quarrying and landscaping, for example) also record human impacts.

It has been suggested[by whom?] that the deposition of calthemite formations exemplify a natural process which has not previously occurred prior to the human modification of the Earth's surface, and which therefore represents a unique process of the Anthropocene.[83] Calthemite is a secondary deposit, derived from concrete, lime, mortar or other calcareous material outside the cave environment.[84] Calthemites grow on or under man-made structures (including mines and tunnels) and mimic the shapes and forms of cave speleothems, such as stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone etc.
Stratigraphy[edit]
Sedimentological record[edit]

Human activities like deforestation and road construction are believed to have elevated average total sediment fluxes across the Earth's surface.[5] However, construction of dams on many rivers around the world means the rates of sediment deposition in any given place do not always appear to increase in the Anthropocene. For instance, many river deltas around the world are actually currently starved of sediment by such dams, and are subsiding and failing to keep up with sea level rise, rather than growing.[5][85]
Fossil record[edit]

Increases in erosion due to farming and other operations will be reflected by changes in sediment composition and increases in deposition rates elsewhere. In land areas with a depositional regime, engineered structures will tend to be buried and preserved, along with litter and debris. Litter and debris thrown from boats or carried by rivers and creeks will accumulate in the marine environment, particularly in coastal areas. Such man-made artifacts preserved in stratigraphy are known as "technofossils".[5][86]

Technofossils

Changes in biodiversity will also be reflected in the fossil record, as will species introductions. An example cited is the domestic chicken, originally the red junglefowl Gallus gallus, native to south-east Asia but has since become the world's most common bird through human breeding and consumption, with over 60 billion consumed annually and whose bones would become fossilised in landfill sites.[87] Hence, landfills are important resources to find "technofossils".[88]
Trace elements[edit]

In terms of trace elements, there are distinct signatures left by modern societies. For example, in the Upper Fremont Glacier in Wyoming, there is a layer of chlorine present in ice cores from 1960's atomic weapon testing programs, as well as a layer of mercury associated with coal plants in the 1980s.[citation needed] From 1945 to 1951, nuclear fallout is found locally around atomic device test sites, whereas from 1952 to 1980, tests of thermonuclear devices have left a clear, global signal of excess 14
C
, 239
Pu
, and other artificial radionuclides.[citation needed] The highest global concentration of radionuclides was in 1965, one of the dates which has been proposed as a possible benchmark for the start of the formally defined Anthropocene.[89]

Human burning of fossil fuels has also left distinctly elevated concentrations of black carbon, inorganic ash, and spherical carbonaceous particles in recent sediments across the world. Concentrations of these components increases markedly and almost simultaneously around the world beginning around 1950.[5]
Temporal limit[edit]
"Early anthropocene" model[edit]
Main article: Early anthropocene

William Ruddiman has argued that the Anthropocene began approximately 8,000 years ago with the development of farming and sedentary cultures.[90] At this point, humans were dispersed across all of the continents (except Antarctica), and the Neolithic Revolution was ongoing. During this period, humans developed agriculture and animal husbandry to supplement or replace hunter-gatherer subsistence.[91] Such innovations were followed by a wave of extinctions, beginning with large mammals and land birds. This wave was driven by both the direct activity of humans (e.g. hunting) and the indirect consequences of land-use change for agriculture. Landscape-scale burning by prehistoric hunter-gathers may have been an additional early source of anthropogenic atmospheric carbon.[92]

Ruddiman also claims that the greenhouse gas emissions in-part responsible for the Anthropocene began 8,000 years ago when ancient farmers cleared forests to grow crops.[93][94][95] Ruddiman's work has, in turn, been challenged with data from an earlier interglaciation ("Stage 11", approximately 400,000 years ago) which suggests that 16,000 more years must elapse before the current Holocene interglaciation comes to an end, and thus the early anthropogenic hypothesis is invalid.[96] Furthermore, the argument that "something" is needed to explain the differences in the Holocene is challenged by more recent research showing that all interglacials differ.[97]

Moreover, scholars have claimed that the land change and greenhouse gas emissions caused by Neolithic farming practices do not account for a large enough systems change to denote new epochal designation.[98] This claim is the basis for an assertion that an early date for the proposed Anthropocene term does account for a substantial human footprint on Earth.[99][100] Others have argued that the Early Anthropocene Hypothesis only provides a cursory view of Native American farming practices prior to European colonization, which did not result in the same land change or greenhouse gas emissions as European and Asian agriculture of the same period. Thus, if precolonial Native American farming practices were studied in relation to the hypothesis, the European colonization of the Americas would be seen as the epoch's starting point.[101][102]
Antiquity[edit]

One plausible starting point of the Anthropocene could be at c. 2,000 years ago, which roughly coincides with the start of the final phase of Holocene, the Sub Atlantic.[103]

At this time, the Roman Empire encompassed large portions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In China the classical dynasties were flowering. The Middle kingdoms of India had already the largest economy of the ancient and medieval world. The Napata/Meroitic kingdom extended over the current Sudan and Ethiopia. The Olmecs controlled central Mexico and Guatemala, and the pre-Incan Chavín people managed areas of northern Peru.[104] Although often apart from each other and intermixed with buffering ecosystems, the areas directly impacted by these civilisations and others were large. Additionally, some activities, such as mining, implied much more widespread perturbation of natural conditions.[105][106] Over the last 11,500 years or so humans have spread around Earth, increased in number, and profoundly altered the material world. They have taken advantage of global environmental conditions not of their own making. The end of the last glacial period – when as much as 30% of Earth's surface was ice-bound – led to a warmer world with more water (H
2O). Although humans existed in the previous Pleistocene epoch, it is only in the recent Holocene period that they have flourished. Today there are more humans alive than at any previous point in Earth's history.[7]
European colonization of the Americas[edit]

Maslin and Lewis argue that the start of the Anthropocene should be dated to the Orbis Spike, a trough in carbon dioxide levels associated with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Reaching a minimum around 1610, global carbon dioxide levels were depressed below 285 parts per million, largely as a result of sequestration due to forest regrowth in the Americas. This was likely caused by indigenous peoples abandoning farmland following a sharp population decline due to initial contact with European diseases – around 50 million people or 90% of the indigenous population may have succumbed. For Maslin and Lewis, the Orbis Spike represents a GSSP, a kind of marker used to define the start of a new geological period. They also go on to say that associating the Anthropocene to European arrival in the Americas makes sense given that the continent's colonization was instrumental in the development of global trade networks and the capitalist economy, which played a significant role in initiating the Industrial Revolution and the Great Acceleration.[107][108]

A number of other anthropologists, geographers, and postcolonial, settler colonial, and Indigenous theorists have linked the Anthropocene to the rise of European colonialism.[109][102][110][108][111][112][113] Because of these arguments, it has been suggested that the epoch should instead be called "The Kleptocene" in order to call "attention to colonialism’s ongoing theft of land, lives (both human and nonhuman), and materials" that are "in large part responsible for contemporary ecological crisis."[114]
Industrial Revolution[edit]

Crutzen proposed the Industrial Revolution as the start of Anthropocene.[40] Lovelock proposes that the Anthropocene began with the first application of the Newcomen atmospheric engine in 1712.[115] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change takes the pre-industrial era (chosen as the year 1750) as the baseline related to changes in long-lived, well mixed greenhouse gases.[116] Although it is apparent that the Industrial Revolution ushered in an unprecedented global human impact on the planet,[117] much of Earth's landscape already had been profoundly modified by human activities.[118] The human impact on Earth has grown progressively, with few substantial slowdowns.
Great Acceleration[edit]

In May 2019 the twenty-nine members of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) proposed a start date for the Epoch in the mid-twentieth century, as that period saw "a rapidly rising human population accelerated the pace of industrial production, the use of agricultural chemicals and other human activities. At the same time, the first atomic-bomb blasts littered the globe with radioactive debris that became embedded in sediments and glacial ice, becoming part of the geologic record." The official start-dates, according to the panel, would coincide with either the radionuclides released into the atmosphere from bomb detonations in 1945, or with the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.[119]
Anthropocene markers[edit]

A marker that accounts for a substantial global impact of humans on the total environment, comparable in scale to those associated with significant perturbations of the geological past, is needed in place of minor changes in atmosphere composition.[120][121]

A useful candidate for this purpose is the pedosphere, which can retain information of its climatic and geochemical history with features lasting for centuries or millennia.[122] Human activity is now firmly established as the sixth factor of soil formation.[123] It affects pedogenesis directly by, for example, land levelling, trenching and embankment building, organic matter enrichment from additions of manure or other waste, organic matter impoverishment due to continued cultivation and compaction from overgrazing. Human activity also affects pedogenesis indirectly by drift of eroded materials or pollutants. Anthropogenic soils are those markedly affected by human activities, such as repeated ploughing, the addition of fertilisers, contamination, sealing, or enrichment with artefacts (in the World Reference Base for Soil Resources they are classified as Anthrosols and Technosols). They are recalcitrant repositories of artefacts and properties that testify to the dominance of the human impact, and hence appear to be reliable markers for the Anthropocene. Some anthropogenic soils may be viewed as the 'golden spikes' of geologists (Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point), which are locations where there are strata successions with clear evidences of a worldwide event, including the appearance of distinctive fossils.[103] Drilling for fossil fuels has also created holes and tubes which are expected to be detectable for millions of years.[124] The astrobiologist David Grinspoon has proposed that the site of the Apollo 11 Lunar landing, with the disturbances and artifacts that are so uniquely characteristic of our species' technological activity and which will survive over geological time spans could be considered as the 'golden spike' of the Anthropocene.[125]

An October 2020 study coordinated by University of Colorado at Boulder found that distinct physical, chemical and biological changes to Earth's rock layers began around the year 1950. The research revealed that since about 1950, humans have doubled the amount of fixed nitrogen on the planet through industrial production for agriculture, created a hole in the ozone layer through the industrial scale release of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), released enough greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels to cause planetary level climate change, created tens of thousands of synthetic mineral-like compounds that do not naturally occur on Earth, and caused almost one-fifth of river sediment worldwide to no longer reach the ocean due to dams, reservoirs and diversions. Humans have produced so many millions of tons of plastic each year since the early 1950s that microplastics are "forming a near-ubiquitous and unambiguous marker of Anthropocene".[126][127] The study highlights a strong correlation between global human population size and growth, global productivity and global energy use and that the "extraordinary outburst of consumption and productivity demonstrates how the Earth System has departed from its Holocene state since ~1950 CE, forcing abrupt physical, chemical and biological changes to the Earth’s stratigraphic record that can be used to justify the proposal for naming a new epoch—the Anthropocene."[127]

A December 2020 study published in Nature found that the total anthropogenic mass, or human-made materials, outweighs all the biomass on earth, and highlighted that "this quantification of the human enterprise gives a mass-based quantitative and symbolic characterization of the human-induced epoch of the Anthropocene."[128][129]

Recently, a group of geologists, archaeologists, environmental scientists and geographers, including current ICS Secretary General Phil Gibbard, have proposed to recognize the Anthropocene as an ongoing geological event analogous to the Great Oxidation Event, rather than as an epoch in the GTS.[130]
In culture[edit]
Humanities[edit]

The concept of the Anthropocene has also been approached via humanities such as philosophy, literature and art. In the scholarly world, it has been the subject of increasing attention through special journals,[131] and conferences,[132][133] and disciplinary reports.[134] The Anthropocene, its attendant timescale, and ecological implications prompt questions about death and the end of civilisation,[135] memory and archives,[136] the scope and methods of humanistic inquiry,[137] and emotional responses to the "end of nature".[138]

Historians have actively engaged the Anthropocene. In 2000, the same year that Paul Crutzen coined the term, world historian John McNeill published Something New Under the Sun tracing the rise of human societies' unprecedented impact on the planet in the twentieth century.[139] In 2001, historian of science Naomi Oreskes revealed the systematic efforts to undermine trust in climate change science and went on to detail the corporate interests delaying action on the environmental challenge.[140][141] Both McNeill and Oreskes became members of the Anthropocene Working Group because of their work correlating human activities and planetary transformation. In 2009, Dipesh Chakrabarty pointed to the dilemma that the Anthropocene poses for the practice of history: on the one hand, it spells "the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history" yet, on the other, societies and individuals do not experience themselves as "species."[142] In 2014, Julia Adeney Thomas highlighted problems of scale and value as the reasons for this irresolvable tension between human stories and scientific ones.[143] Since 2007, historians and scientists have been actively collaborating on multidisciplinary approaches to the Anthropocene.[144] Together with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC), the Deutsches Museum (Munich, Germany) hosted a major special exhibition on the Anthropocene from December 2014 – September 2016, "Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands", which was then digitized as a virtual exhibition on the RCC’s Environment & Society Portal.[145][146] In 2016, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean Baptiste-Fressoz published The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us in an attempt to provide "the first critical history of the Anthropocene" through engagement with the history of science, world history, and human development.[147]

As anthropogenic ecological crises and environmental disasters increase,[148] so too do emotional responses to these issues. The emotional responses are inherently adaptive and with appropriate support can lead to action and collective support. Evidence suggests that increase in reflective functioning and capacity for emotional processing can support the emotional responses through crisis, leading to stronger societal responses and individual resilience.[149]

Controversy

The 'anthropocene' has been also criticized as an ideological construct.[150] Some environmental scholars suggest that "Capitalocene" is a more historically appropriate term.[151][152] At the same time, others suggest that the Anthropocene ignores systematic inequalities, such as imperialism and racism, that have contributed to the environmental degradation that would mark the Epoch.[153][113] In this vein, some thinkers have proposed the "Plantationocene" as a more appropriate term to call attention to the role that plantation agriculture has played in the formation of the Epoch, as it marks "the ways that plantation logics organize modern economies, environments, bodies, and social relations".[154][155]
Popular culture[edit]
The concept gained attention of the public via documentary films[citation needed] such as The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning, The Polar Explorer, L'homme a mangé la Terre, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch and Anthropocene.
David Grinspoon makes a further distinction in the Anthropocene, namely the "proto-Anthropocene" and "mature Anthropocene". He also mentions the term "Terra Sapiens", or Wise Earth.[156]
In 2019, the English musician Nick Mulvey released a music video on YouTube named "In The Anthropocene".[157] In cooperation with Sharp's Brewery, the song was recorded on 105 vinyl records made of washed-up plastic from the Cornish coast.[158]
The Anthropocene Reviewed is a podcast and book by author John Green, where he "reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale".[159]
In 2015, the American death metal band Cattle Decapitation released its seventh studio album titled The Anthropocene Extinction.[160]
In 2020, the artist Grimes released an album titled Miss Anthropocene.
See also[edit]

Anthropocentrism
Anthropogenic biomes
Climate engineering
Control of fire by early humans
Defaunation
Ecocriticism
Geobiology
Great Transition
Holocene extinction
Human overpopulation
Hypoxia (environmental)
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme
Meghalayan
Novel ecosystem
Overconsumption
Planetary boundaries
Plastic pollution
Power Down: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World
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^ Grinspoon, David (20 December 2016). "Welcome to Terra Sapiens". Aeon Essays.
^ "In The Anthropocene" song from Nick Mulvey
^ CMU: Nick Mulvey releases vinyl made from recycled plastic washed up on Cornish beaches
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^ Staff writer(s) (20 May 2015). "CATTLE DECAPITATION To Release 'The Anthropocene Extinction' This August Via Metal Blade Records" (Press release). Metal Blade Records. Retrieved 20 October2020.
Further reading[edit]
Bonneuil, Christophe; Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste.(2016) The Shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, History and Us, Verso Books. Translated by David Fernbach. Originally published as L’événement Anthropocène: La terre, l’histoire et nous. Le Seuil 2013
Davies, Jeremy (2016). The Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland, CA, USA: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520289970.
Dixon, Simon J; Viles, Heather A; Garrett, Bradley L (2018). "Ozymandias in the Anthropocene: the city as an emerging landform". Area. 50: 117–125. doi:10.1111/area.12358. ISSN 1475-4762.
Ellis, Erle (2018). Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction. 1. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198792987.001.0001. ISBN 9780198792987.
Ellis, Erle C.; Fuller, Dorian Q.; Kaplan, Jed O.; Lutters, Wayne G. (2013). "Dating the Anthropocene: Towards an empirical global history of human transformation of the terrestrial biosphere". Elementa. 1: 000018. doi:10.12952/journal.elementa.000018.
Emmett, Robert, Thomas Lekan, eds. "Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Four Theses,’" RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2016, no. 2. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7421.
Grinspoon, David (December 2016). "Welcome to Terra Sapiens". Aeon.
Hamilton, Clive (2017). Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. Polity. ISBN 978-1509519750.
Ialenti, Vincent. 2016. "Generation (Lexicon for An Anthropocene Yet Unseen)". Cultural Anthropology: Theorising the Contemporary. Archived from the original on 7 May 2016. Retrieved 13 April 2016.
Kim, Rakhyun E. (2021). "Taming Gaia 2.0: Earth System Law in the Ruptured Anthropocene". The Anthropocene Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/20530196211026721
Kim, Rakhyun E.; Klaus Bosselmann (2013). "International Environmental Law in the Anthropocene: Towards a Purposive System of Multilateral Environmental Agreements". Transnational Environmental Law. 2 (2): 285–309. doi:10.1017/S2047102513000149. S2CID 146464921.
MacCormack, Patricia (2020). The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1350081093.
McArthur, Jo-Anne; Wilson, Keith, eds. (2020). Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene. Lantern Publishing & Media. ISBN 978-1590566381.
Purdy, Jedediah. (2015). "Anthropocene Fever". Aeon. pp. 1–9.
Ripple WJ, Wolf C, Newsome TM, Galetti M, Alamgir M, Crist E, Mahmoud MI, Laurance WF (2017). "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice". BioScience. 67 (12): 1026–1028. doi:10.1093/biosci/bix125.
Ruddiman, William F. (December 2003). "The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago". Climatic Change. 61 (3): 261–293. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.651.2119. doi:10.1023/B:CLIM.0000004577.17928.fa. S2CID 2501894.
Ruddiman, William F.; Stephen J. Vavrus & John E. Kutzbach (2005). "A test of the overdue-glaciation hypothesis" (PDF). Quaternary Science Reviews. 24 (1): 11. Bibcode:2005QSRv...24....1R. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2004.07.010. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 October 2006.
Ruddiman, William F. (2005). Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-12164-2.
Schmidt, G. A.; D. T. Shindel & S. Harder (2004). "A note on the relationship between ice core methane concentrations and insolation". Geophysical Research Letters. 31 (23): L23206. Bibcode:2004GeoRL..3123206S. doi:10.1029/2004GL021083.
Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew (2017). "Some Islands Will Rise: Singapore in the Anthropocene". Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. 4 (2): 166–184. doi:10.5250/resilience.4.2-3.0166. S2CID 158809548.
Steffen, Will; Crutzen, Paul; McNeill, John (2007). "The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?". AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment. 36 (8): 614–621. doi:10.1579/0044-7447(2007)36[614:taahno]2.0.co;2. hdl:1885/29029. PMID 18240674.
Steffen, Will; et al. (9 August 2018). "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene". PNAS. 115 (33): 8252–8259. Bibcode:2018PNAS..115.8252S. doi:10.1073/pnas.1810141115. hdl:2078.1/204292. PMC 6099852. PMID 30082409.
Thomas, Julia Adeney, Jan Zalasiewicz, "Strata and Three Stories." RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2020, no. 3. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/9205.
Trischler, Helmuth, ed. "Anthropocene: Exploring the Future of the Age of Humans," RCC Perspectives 2013, no 3. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/5603.
Visconti, Guido (2014). "Anthropocene: another academic invention?" (PDF). Rend. Fis. Acc. Lincei. 25 (3): 381–392. doi:10.1007/s12210-014-0317-x. S2CID 128678966.
"Human-Driven Planet: Time to Make It Official?". Science Now. January 2008.
Klinkenborg, Verlyn (December 2016). What’s Happening to the Bees and Butterflies? New York Review of Books
Vanishing: The Sixth Mass Extinction, and How to stop the sixth mass extinction (December 2016), CNN.
Williams, Mark; Zalasiewicz, Jan; Haff, P. K.; Schwägerl, Christian; Barnosky, Anthony D.; Ellis, Erle C. (2015). "The Anthropocene Biosphere". The Anthropocene Review. 2 (3): 196–219. doi:10.1177/2053019615591020. S2CID 7771527.
'Ozymandias in the Anthropocene: the city as an emerging landform', Dixon S., et al. (2017) AREA, Royal Geographical Society ISSN 1475-4762
External links[edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Anthropocene

Look up Anthropocene in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Anthropocene.

External video
Welcome to the Anthropocene on YouTube
The Economist: The Anthropocene: A Man-Made World on YouTube
Ten Things to Know About the Anthropocene on YouTube
100,000,000 Years From Now on YouTube
(2014) Noam Chomsky: The Anthropocene Period and its Challenges on YouTube

"Have humans created a new geological age?", New Scientist, 24 January 2008
Videos of a Radcliffe conference on Biodiversity in the Anthropocene, 10 March 2006
"Debate over the Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis", RealClimate, December 2005
"Earth Is Us", Dot Earth blog, New York Times, 28 January 2008
Recent work on the Early Anthropocene Hypothesis presented at AGU, December 2008
(in French) Thierry Picquet, "New era in the evolution of the world", Planétarisation
Humanity Blamed for 9,000 Years of Global Warming
Nothing new under the sun: Anthropogenic global warming started when people began farming, The Economist review; includes nice graphic showing the rise in methane (a greenhouse gas), from agricultural slash-and-burn started 8,000 years ago.
How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?, Scientific American, 2005
Methane: A Scientific Journey from Obscurity to Climate Super-Stardom NASA
Anthropocene: Have humans created a new geological age? BBC News, 11 May 2011
Vince, G. (2011). "An Epoch Debate". Science. 334 (6052): 32–37. Bibcode:2011Sci...334...32V. doi:10.1126/science.334.6052.32. PMID 21980090.
Steffen, W; Crutzen, PJ; McNeill, JR (2007). "The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of Nature?" (PDF). AMBIO. 36 (8): 614–621. doi:10.1579/0044-7447(2007)36[614:taahno]2.0.co;2. hdl:1885/29029. PMID 18240674.
The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?, The Guardian, 2019
Tooze, Adam, "Whose century?", London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 15 (30 July 2020), pp. 9–13. Tooze closes (p. 13): "Can [the US] fashion a domestic political bargain to enable the US to become what it currently is not: a competent and co-operative partner in the management of the collective risks of the Anthropocene. This is what the Green New Deal promised. After the shock of COVID-19 it is more urgent than ever."
The forgotten environmental crisis: how 20th century settler writers foreshadowed the Anthropocene. The Conversation. 3 December 2020.
Drawing A Line In The Mud: Scientists Debate When 'Age Of Humans' Began. NPR. 17 March 2021.

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