Mark Teeuwen and John Breen’s new coauthored book on the social history of the Ise shrines comes out at an interesting time, when the shrines are once again in the public eye following their latest rebuilding, the visits of Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, and the recent G7 Ise-Shima summit. With Ise re-entering the sphere of public and academic interest in Japan, the history of different aspects of kami worship has also been attracting more attention in the West. Thanks to the recently established Bloomsbury Shinto Studies series, in which Teeuwen and Breen’s book is the fourth volume, and several other monographs on this subject which appeared elsewhere in 2016–17, the number of incisive and valuable contributions to the study of the history of Shintō in Western languages is generally increasing, prompting a hope that a deeper and more nuanced understanding of this form of Japan’s religiosity will take hold within the wider academic community. This should be a welcome development in itself. Better still, Teeuwen and Breen’s study focuses on a very special case that in multiple ways is central to the past and present of Japan, both on its own terms as a cultural entity, a polity, and a nation, and within broader East Asian and global contexts. Ise is the site of enshrinement of two important deities, Amaterasu and Toyuke; of these, the former has been revered as the divine ancestor of Japan’s imperial family, and the latter was understood at different times as either the goddess of sacred food presented daily to Amaterasu or as another, equally imposing, imperial deity. According to Japan’s earliest written sources, Ise’s history might hark back to the prehistoric age, but no detailed studies of it in English have yet revealed the full extent and complexity of how and why the Ise shrines have survived as an institution for so long, or what economic or political mechanisms, media, and agents were involved in the making of Ise’s continued importance in Japanese history. Teeuwen and Breen’s book (of which the fi rst six chapters are authored by Teeuwen and the latter four by Breen) fi nally solves this problem and provides the long overdue answers to these questions. To date, several studies have used an already tried and tested approach to studying the religious sites in situ, an approach fi rst introduced to the scholarly analysis of Japanese religions by Alan Grapard in his study of the Kasuga shrine and Kōfukuji in the 1990s. Here, without compromising on discussion of the effects of the plentiful religious developments that took

中文翻译：

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伊势神社的社会史：神圣之都 Mark Teeuwen 和 John Breen

马克·蒂文 (Mark Teeuwen) 和约翰·布林 (John Breen) 合着的关于伊势神宫社会历史的新书出版于一个有趣的时刻，在最近的重建、日本首相安倍晋三的访问以及最近的G7伊势志摩峰会。随着伊势在日本重新进入公众和学术领域，神崇拜的不同方面的历史也在西方引起了更多的关注。感谢最近成立的布卢姆斯伯里神道研究系列，其中 Teeuwen 和 Breen 的书是第四卷，以及 2016-17 年出现在其他地方的关于这个主题的其他几本专着，对历史研究的精辟和宝贵贡献的数量西方语言中的神道教普遍增加，促使人们希望，对这种形式的日本宗教信仰的更深入、更细致的理解将在更广泛的学术界中占据一席之地。这本身应该是一个受欢迎的发展。更妙的是，Teeuwen 和 Breen 的研究侧重于一个非常特殊的案例，它在多个方面对日本的过去和现在都至关重要，无论是就其作为文化实体、政体和国家的自身而言，还是在更广泛的东亚和全球背景。伊势是供奉天照大神和东佑两大神明的地方。其中，前者被尊为日本皇室的神祖，而后者在不同时期被理解为每日献给天照大神的神食女神或另一位同样威风凛凛的皇神。根据日本最早的书面资料，伊势神宫的历史可能可以追溯到史前时代，但还没有详细的英语研究揭示伊势神宫如何以及为何作为一个机构幸存这么久，或者是什么经济或政治机制，媒体和代理人参与了伊势在日本历史上的持续重要性。Teeuwen 和 Breen 的书（其中前六章由 Teeuwen 撰写，后四章由 Breen 撰写）最终解决了这个问题，并为这些问题提供了迟来的答案。迄今为止，有几项研究使用了一种已经尝试和测试的方法来研究原位宗教场所，这种方法首先被引入到艾伦·格拉帕德 (Alan Grapard) 在 1990 年代研究春日神社和兴福寺时对日本宗教的学术分析。这里，