Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan

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Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan is written by Ioannis Gaitanidis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1350262625 (ISBN 10) and 9781350262621 (ISBN 13).

This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this “new spirituality culture”; by “spiritual therapists” who have sought to eke out a livelihood in an increasingly professionalized and regulated therapeutic field; and by the cruel optimism of an increasingly precarious workforce placing its hopes in the imagined alternative that the supirichuaru represents. Ioannis Gaitanidis offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of 'alternativity' that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies and the anthropology/sociology of medicine.