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Women of the Sacred Groves, Divine Priestesses of Okinawa. By SUSAN SERED. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
Susan Sered has written a captivating ethnography of Okinawan female priestesses on an island called Henza. Based on a total of thirteen months in residence there during 1994 and 1995, she presents a highly engaging study of her subjects with whom she very clearly enjoyed excellent rapport. Her study presents a number of life histories in a very readable style that manages to be both jargon free and closely tied to the theoretical nexus she has established.
JAS readers who do not immediately recognize Sered's name can be forgiven; her work to date has focused on women's roles in Judaism and on studies of religious groups or cultic associations in which women predominate. She has previously written on "religious cultures in which women are the leaders" (p. 4), such as the Zar cults in Africa, spirit cults of northern Thailand, Korean shamanism, Candomble and Macumba in Brazil, Christian Science, Shakerism, and others. This is her first study of Japan.
Sered wanted to study Okinawa, she writes, because while the groups just named exist outside the dominant social and religious mainstream of their respective societies, on Okinawa the priestesses constitute the mainstream and are "independent of any kind of overarching male-dominated institutional framework ... Okinawan women are the acknowledged and respected leaders of the publicly supported and publicly funded indigenous religion in which both men and women participate" (p. 4). She undertook a village study, because, she writes,
A case study, even of a small village like Henza, provides proof that male dominance of the religious sphere is not universal, not axiomatic, and not necessary. Henza villagers offer an alternative vision of a world uncolored by assumptions about God the Father who creates, commands, and punishes His children and a renewed hope that women and men can move beyond the hierarchical paradigms that oppress the spirit and constrain the imagination. (p. 12)
This is a brave book. Sered learned Japanese purely to undertake this study, taking her Israeli husband and three children with...