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of the Histories of Anthropology

French ethnologist Laurence Caillet (1947–2023) trained at the Department of Anthropology of Tokyo University in the early 1970s. She conducted numerous surveys in Japan in the following decades, mainly in Kansai, Tôhoku and Tôkyô. The study of both esoteric and exoteric rituals provided the ethnographic material on which her thinking is based. Her anthropology of religion focuses on the ways in which knowledge is built. By analysing the processes of rapid modernisation of Japan, she highlights the constant references to a rural Japan and to crucial Japanese values, whether in contemporary discourse or praxis. A professor at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, she directed the laboratory of comparative ethnology and sociology. She is the author of Fêtes traditionnelles en Asie: Japon (1984), La maison Yamasaki (1991), Fêtes et rites des 4 saisons au Japon (2002), Ethnographies japonaises (ed., 2006), and Démons et merveilles. Nuits japonaises (2018).

Keywords: Japan | Rituals | Ritual | Anthropology of religion | Nature | Modernity | value

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