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II. Sensorialité et présence – Sensoriality and Presence

Re-opening the Royal Road: The Unquiet War Dead of the Northern Marianas Islands

Réouverture de la voie royale : les morts silencieux des îles Mariannes du Nord
Ellen Schattschneider
p. 107-128

Abstracts

This article explores intersecting experiences of landscapes of death in the Northern Marianas islands, in the shadow of brutal battles during World War II. My discussion builds upon prior work on how the human body registers personal and historical trauma. I emphasize that in East Asian and Pacific contexts, “the body” is often best understood as extending into the immediate spatial environs, to include topography, air and water flows, and floral and faunal entities. Ritual process of healing this traumatized somatized land-person continuum revolve around reworking the body-landscape matrix, reconfiguring the ontological status of those who perished under horrific circumstances.

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Excerpt

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Outline

Embodied Royal Roads: The Body (and the Landscape) “Keeps the Score”
Historical Contexts
The White Horse
The Okinawan Repatriation Association
Removing a Stranded Soul
Conclusion: Variegated Landscapes of Death

First lines

For many thousands who reside upon or visit the islands of the Northern Marianas chain, the souls of the unsettled Dead often seem ubiquitous. Scenes of some the fiercest land battles of the Pacific War in 1944, these landscapes witnessed horrific casualties by Japanese and American military forces as well extensive death and violence by civilian Japanese and Okinawan residents, hundreds of whom were victims of coerced suicide on the cliffs of Saipan and Tinian. The enduring legacies of these mass deaths, including scattered human skeletal remains and less tangible traces of the Dead, call forth a great range of memorial responses, including improvisational ritual initiatives on collective and individual levels.

This article explores intersecting experiences of landscapes of death by indigenous Chamorro and Carolinians and by visiting Japanese and Okinawan pilgrims, who annually travel to the islands to pray at the sites where their relatives lost their lives during the bloody battle...

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References

Bibliographical reference

Ellen Schattschneider, “Re-opening the Royal Road: The Unquiet War Dead of the Northern Marianas Islands”Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident, 47 | 2024, 107-128.

Electronic reference

Ellen Schattschneider, “Re-opening the Royal Road: The Unquiet War Dead of the Northern Marianas Islands”Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident [Online], 47 | 2024, Online since 01 January 2027, connection on 10 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/extremeorient/3162; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12ko0

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About the author

Ellen Schattschneider

Ellen Schattschneider is a sociocultural anthropologist at Brandeis University, specializing in psychoanalytic, phenomenological and practice approaches to culture. Her academic writings give particular attention to ritual performance, historical trauma, gender and embodiment, spirit mediumship, sacred landscapes, visuality and the power of images, popular religious experience and comparative capitalist cultures. Her book, Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain (Durham, Duke University Press, 2003) explores healing, self-fashioning and embodied psychodynamic processes on a sacred landscape associated with a Shinto shrine founded by a rural Japanese woman in the 1920s. Her current research interests include the ritual and materialized dimensions of traumatic popular memories of World War I; automata and the spirit of capitalism in early modern Japan; and simulacra and sacrality in Japanese garden landscapes.
Ellen Schattschneider est anthropologue des questions socioculturelles à l’université Brandeis, spécialisée dans les approches psychanalytiques, phénoménologiques et pratiques de la culture. Ses écrits universitaires accordent une attention particulière aux performances rituelles, aux traumatismes historiques, au genre et à l’incarnation, à la médiumnité, aux paysages sacrés, à la visualité et au pouvoir des images, à l’expérience religieuse populaire et aux cultures capitalistes comparées. Son livre, Immortal Wishes : Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain (Durham, Duke University Press, 2003), explore les processus de guérison, d’auto-façonnage et de psychodynamique incarnée dans un paysage sacré associé à un sanctuaire shinto fondé par une femme japonaise rurale dans les années 1920. Ses recherches actuelles portent sur les dimensions rituelles et matérielles des souvenirs populaires traumatisants de la Première Guerre mondiale, sur les automates et l’esprit du capitalisme dans le Japon du début des temps modernes, ainsi que sur les simulacres et la sacralité dans les jardins japonais.

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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