Dr Barbara Ambros (University of North Carolina), Rescuing Cattle and Bestializing Butchers:  Animals, Morality, and Marginality in Early Modern Japan 

Ritual animal releases have a long history in Japan, beginning in the seventh century, about two centuries after such rituals arose in China. From the mid-eighth century, the releases became large-scale Shinto-Buddhist state rites conducted at Hachiman shrines. A different tradition of devotional animal releases emerged from the mid-seventeenth century, which was driven by the ethic of refraining from killing and releasing life and strongly influenced by the popularity of late Ming morality books from China, especially the introduction of Yunqi Zhuhong’s Jiesha fangsheng wen (Tract on refraining from killing and releasing life, 1584). Morality literature on life releases primarily focused on small animals such as fish, turtles, and birds, but in the late eighteenth century, initiatives emerged to rescue cattle and horses from slaughter. This presentation analyzes early modern Japanese Buddhist morality literature promoting the protection of cattle and horses and the establishment of livestock sanctuaries in the context of the status system and the marginalized position of leatherworkers. A complex mechanism of delineating the categories of humanity and animality was at work in late-eighteenth- through mid-nineteenth-century morality literature. The marginal status of early modern leatherworkers, who specialized in labor that brought them into close contact with non-human animals and death, situated them beyond the ontological boundary of the human and denied them full soteriological potential. By contrast, cattle and horses were portrayed as paragons of virtue and included in the community of moral subjects. In their zeal to save cattle and horses from slaughter, proponents of livestock sanctuaries demonized and dehumanized outcast leatherworkers whose trade they portrayed as inhumane and defiled, thus reinforcing status-based discrimination through discourses of animal protection. 

Bio

Barbara R. Ambros holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Civilization and Languages from Harvard University (2002), an MA in Regional Studies East Asia from Harvard University (1995), and an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University (1993). Currently, she is a professor of East Asian Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research on Japanese Religions has focused on gender studies, human-animal relationships, and place and space. Her book publications include Le donne nell’ordine monastico buddhista (Myo Edizioni, 2019), Women in Japanese Religions (New York University Press, 2015), Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012), and Emplacing a Pilgrimage: The Early Modern Ōyama Cult and Regional Religion (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008). She is currently working on a monograph on ritual releases of captive animals in early modern Japan.

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