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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities

The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities

Bathgate, Michael

Paperback

Series: Religion in History, Society and Culture

General Eastern Religions

ISBN10: 1138878960
ISBN13: 9781138878969
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Apr 23 2015
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
For more than a millennium, the fox has been a ubiquitous figure at the margins of the Japanese collective imagination. In the writings of the nobility and the motifs of popular literature, the fox is known as a shapeshifter, able to assume various forms in order to deceive others. Focusing on recurring themes of transformation and duplicity in folklore, theology, and court and village practice, The Fox's Craft explores the meanings and uses of shapeshifter fox imagery in Japanese history. Michael Bathgate finds that the shapeshifting powers of the fox make it a surprisingly fundamental symbol in the discourse of elite and folk alike, and a key component in formulations of marriage and human identity, religious knowledge, and the power of money. The symbol of the shapeshifter fox thus provides a vantage point from which to understand the social practice of signification.

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