The DOI matches its Crossref record.
“Buy Me a Bride”: Death and Exchange in Northern Japanese Bride‐Doll Marriage
Abstract
In the northern Japanese memorial practice of “bride‐doll marriage/” which emerged during World War II, the soul of a dead child is married to a spirit spouse embodied in a consecrated figurine. These marriages stimulate limited exchange relationships between the living and dead by building on old and new modes of gifting and circulation, including the prestation of Bodhisattva statues, affinity, transmigration, and the abstraction of social relations made possible by modern commodity forms. Motivated by a strong sense of unfulfilled obligation toward the deceased, these restricted acts of exchange culminate in the cessation of exchange transactions between the living and specific dead persons. In this respect, spirit marriage is profoundly unlike conventional marriage among the living, which leads to ramifying exchange relations between a growing number of persons over time. [Japan, memorialization, mortuary ritual, commodities, Buddhism]
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“But like the body substitution talismans that spread as a commodity for soldiers only during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-1905 (Bond 2014, 125) and the bride dolls of Northern Japan that were a phenomenon triggered by the Pacific War (Schattschneider 2001, 857), the view that Ichimatsu dolls function as body substitutes seems to be a Meiji and Taisho period development.”
From Things that Believe: Talismans, Amulets, Dolls, and How to Get Rid of Them (2018) · cites this paper as Schattschneider 2001
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 41
- Barthes Roland, 1981, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photograph. Richard Howard, trans
- Battaglia Debbora, 1990, On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory, and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society
- Blacker Carmen, 1975, The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanislic Practices in Japan
- Evans‐Pritchard E. E., 1951, Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer
- Field Norma, 1991, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor. Japan at Century's End
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226259031.001.0001 · DOI
- Hardacre Helen, 1983, The Cave and the Womb World, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 10, 149
- 10.1525/9780520922044 · DOI
- Harrison Elizabeth G., 1996, Religion in Japan: Arrows to Heaven and Earth, 250
- Haug Wolfgang Fritz, 1986, A Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226388342.001.0001 · DOI
- Jordan David K., 1972, Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors: The Folk Religion of a Taiwanese Village
- 10.1515/9781400843671 · DOI
- Lalvani Suren, 1996, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies
- Law Jane Marie, 1997, Puppets of Nostalgia: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of the Japanese Akawji Ningyô Tradition
- Lévi‐Strauss Claude, 1966, The Savage Mind
- Lévi‐Strauss Claude, 1976, Structural Anthropology
- Li Yi‐huan, 1968, Folk Religion and the Worldview in the Southwestern Pacific, 97
- MacGaffey Wyatt, 1993, Astonishment and Power, 18
- Martin Diana, 1991, An Old State in New Settings: Studies in the Social Anthropology of China in Memory of Maurice Freedman, 25
- Marx Karl, 1967, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
- Matsuzaki Kenzo, 1993, Higashi Ajia no shiryó kekkon
- Matsuzaki Kenzo, 1993, Higashi Ajia no shiryó kekkon, 43
- Miller Daniel, 1987, Material Culture and Mass Consumption
- Moeran Brian, 1997, Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives, 181
- Munn Nancy, 1970, Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: Modern Studies in the Social Anthropology of the Australian Aborigines, 141
- Munn Nancy, 1986, The Fame of Gawa
- Ravina Mark Jason, 1999, State‐building and Political Economy in Early‐modern Japan
- 10.1057/9780230375840 · DOI
- Sakurai Tokutarô, 1988, Nihon shamanizumu no kinkyû. Vol. 1
- Schattschneider Ellen1996aCircuits of Discipline: Production Reproduction and the Work of the Gods in Tsugaru Northern Japan.Ph.D. Dissertation Department of Anthropology University of Chicago.
- 10.1215/10679847-4-1-1 · DOI
- Smith Robert J., 1974, Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan
- Tagg John, 1993, The Burden of Representation: Essays in Photographies and Histories
- Takamatsu Keikichi, 1993, Higashi Ajia no shiryô kekkon, 11
- Takeda Akira, 1990, Sorei saishi to shiryô kekkon: Nikkan hikaku minzokugaku no kokoromi
- Topley Marjorie1955Ghost Marriages among the Singapore Chinese. Man (February Section 35):29–30. · DOI
- Topley Marjorie1956Ghost Marriages among the Singapore Chinese: A Further Note. Man (May Section 63):71–72. · DOI
- Van Bremen Jan, 1998, Interpreting Japanese Society: Anthropological Approaches, 131
- Wada Shohei, 1988, Saga to kekkon no minzokugaku
- Weiner Annette, 1976, Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives on Trobriand Exchange
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Things that Believe: Talismans, Amulets, Dolls, and How to Get Rid of Them
Gygi, F. R. (2018) · Japanese Journal of Religious Studies · doi:10.18874/jjrs.45.2.2018.423-452 · Cited by 24
Metadata
- Authors
- Schattschneider, E.
- Affiliations
- Emory University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Schattschneider, Ellen
- Venue
- American Ethnologist
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2001-11
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 854-880
- ISSN
- 0094-0496 (ISSN-L)
- 1548-1425
- OpenAlex
- W2143651786
- Cited by
- 25
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2025: 2 · 2022: 3 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 1 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 1 · 2014: 1 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 1.85
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Ethnologist (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Death, Funerary Practices, and Mourning
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Japanese History and Culture
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Religious studies › Indian and Buddhist Studies
- Keywords
- commemoration, mortuary ritual, exchange relationships, gift-giving, bodhisattva statues, transmigration, affinity, commodity form, World War II, northern Japan, Japanese Buddhism
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: “Buy Me a Bride”: Death and Exchange in Northern Japanese Bride‐Doll Marriage. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1525/ae.2001.28.4.854
- The paper
- Schattschneider, E. (2001). “Buy Me a Bride”: Death and Exchange in Northern Japanese Bride‐Doll Marriage. American Ethnologist. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2001.28.4.854
