La pierre qui vit : naissance et mort des statues dans une ville de pèlerinage
Authors: Lamotte Charlotte 
Published: September 2018

In today's Japan, there is a category of objects with a special status: objects of cult, and especially statues. In Sasaguri, a town of Buddhist pilgrimage, there are a great number of these sacred statues and religious objects. The town constitutes a privileged place of observation for the ethnologist, with its extraordinary richness and density of these objects and the practices related to them. These practices, if they still exist in Japan, are generally distributed in a more disparate manner over the archipelago.

Observing the rites related to the statues of cult and the discourses associated with them, the present article examines the relationship between men and religious objects from two angles: the exterior that is the material and visible actions from men to objects; and the interior, that is the interactions between men and objects, which are not visible. These invisible and intangible actions, which are labelled here "interior" or "interiority", can also be what is understood as the "return" to men's care and attention to the statues, that is the benefit obtained by their religious practices, under the aegis of the Buddhas, deities, spirits or deceased persons' souls.

The care and attention of which the statues are object are so intense that they seem to be thought of almost as living persons; thus, they acquire a strong affective and symbolic value. In this process of "humanization" of the statue, from which the faithful waits for a return, it is possible to distinguish three levels of investments, showing that these objects are different from ordinary objects.

The first level is the consecration of the object by a religious specialist realized through a ceremony, rendering it an artifact having a religious value. This will transform it into an object containing the "subtle principle" of entities thought to have come from the other world. By this process, the statue becomes the focus of rites. The intensity and repetition of these rites will be the condition upon which will depend the obtention of the awaited benefit. This establishes a mode of action that will be considered as the relationship between the faithful and the entity that is celebrated in the statue. The second level of human investment is seen in these intense and repetitive actions of devotion, consisting of the most attentive care given to the statue on the daily basis. Lastly, it happens in certain cases that these deep and repeated interactions with the incarnated entity in the object let emerge a third kind of relationship: it could be described as a fusion between the inferiority of the faithful with that of the entity incarnated in the statue. This can be understood as the ultimate result of the double projection occurring between the two actors involved in the interaction. This fusion could be compared with the phenomenon of possession: the statue would be "possessed" at the same time by the "soul" of the faithful person and that of the entity; it transforms the object into one unique thing, incomparable to any other object, since it is not only the receptacle of the entity, but also that of the projection of an individual, which makes it a unique and irreplaceable object through intense and repeated contact.