著者

福田 雄

出版者

社会学研究会

雑誌

ソシオロジ (ISSN:05841380)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.56, no.2, pp.77-94,114, 2011

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This paper focuses on rituals concerned with disaster which have yet to be noticed, but are worth exploring as a sociological problem. In previous studies of rituals, little attention has been paid to post-disaster rituals concerning the dead. Moreover, the changes in rituals over a long period of time have been mostly ignored. Changes in the social context and the sequences of socially constructed meaning are critical for the understanding of this phenomenon. The long-term observation of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Memorial Ceremony is a worthy case study to clarify the process of how people construct significance to disastrous experiences. Through a diachronic case study of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Memorial Ceremony, rituals performed in the ceremony show new characteristics of public ritual, which distinguish themselves from folk or political rituals. Looking closely at the pictures and historical materials, symbolic actions and speeches given at the ceremony show that symbolic actions in the ceremony gradually shift their direction from the dead to the living. This is in clear contrast to folk rituals whose central object is appeasing or comforting the dead and to political rituals that aim to commend the dead and the tragic past within the framework of an interpretation of political reality. In addition, along with the economic and political changes, televised broadcasting of the ceremony is also an important factor in the change of the direction of rites. It is also implicated from the diachronic observation of the case that creation of "we-feeling" is vital to apprehend the experience of violent death. For further discussions, the social phenomenon of post-disaster rituals can be presented as a particular subject of social research that shows the dynamics of how life and death are socially reorganized in symbolic system of meaning.