Takie Sugiyama Lebra

Millenarian Movements and Resocialization

This paper attempts to throw light upon those aspects of millenarian movements which can be regarded as mechanisms for resocializing adult individuals. The underlying assumption is that the millenarian movement can induce a change in a behavioral system similar to a psychiatric cure for a mental patient or to a correctional treatment for a convict. However, it is not my intention to obscure differences and contrasts lying between millenarian movements and institutional agencies such

Self-Reconstruction in Japanese Religious Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy as a form of persuasion must satisfy two general conditions to achieve its efficacy. First, its repertoire of messages, whether in diagnosis or treatment, must be embedded in the culture of its client so that it can tap his memory stored through enculturation. Second, the therapeutic messages, while they should thus sound familiar, also need to offer something novel or even stunning to arouse their receiver’s curiosity and to capture his imagination. One way of combining these two prerequisites is to single out, simplify, elaborate, or exaggerate a segment of the total cultural fund. Most of the religious cults in Japan, which are known for their claimed records of healing and deliverance of sufferers, utilize this method. This paper focuses on one of these cults and analyzes the experiences of its members with reference to their “self-reconstruction”.

Logic of Salvation: the Case of a Japanese Sect in Hawaii

’I’HIS paper attempts to explore what is involved in religious commitment with focus on the idea of salvation. My objective is to delineate a set of symbolic mechanisms for maintaining faith in salvation. Faith refers to a high degree of autonomy of the internalized belief system maintained in confrontation with external events which an uninvolved observer would consider to contradict and undermine the system. Faith in salvation refers to such autonomy of the conviction either that one is going to attain the state of salvation in the foreseeable future or that one has attained that state irreversibly. If a religion promises salvation to its believer in spite of unpredictable miseries and misfortunes as likely

Discussion: “Cultural Aspects of Family Assessment and Therapy,” Symposium

As an outsider to psychiatry, I was stunned, when entering this palace to participate in the meeting of the World Congress of Psychiatry, at the overwhelming presence and display of drug companies and their advertisements. I felt out of place, and my hopes for interdisciplinary collaboration between psychiatry and anthropology were about to be abandoned. The present symposium, however, has restored my confidence in such collaborative possibilities. All the papers presented here could indeed have been given at an anthropology or other social science meeting. Tseung’s paper in particular reminds me of an anthropology class lecture, and Wolin’s paper follows a major anthropological tradition in offering a functionalist interpretation of rituals.