This article examines how Buddhism localized in Vietnam, forming the historical and cultural basis of today’s Buddhist heritage and tourism. It treats Buddhism as a travelling tradition embedded in Vietnamese social life rather than just doctrine or institution. It traces Buddhism’s arrival and integration with village life, folk beliefs, ancestor and Mother Goddess worship, communal rituals, and sacred landscapes such as mountains, caves, rivers, temples, and pilgrimage routes. The article argues that this localization shapes Vietnamese Buddhist heritage. Buddhist spaces are not only worship sites but layered socio-cultural environments where scripture, historical memory, ritual, local beliefs, and natural landscapes intersect. Today, these spaces are conserved and promoted as cultural heritage, scenic landscapes, festival venues, and spiritual tourism sites. The article concludes that Buddhist tourism in Vietnam extends and transforms localized religious practices, cultural memories, and sacred landscapes rather than being merely a modern policy product.
This article explores the series Natsume Yuujincho, and the folkloric, mythological and religious qualities within the anime, its broader impact on its audience, and how fans engage and are re-enchanted by the seichi junrei, or sacred site pilgrimages. The series itself deftly weaves explicit Shinto influences such as kotodama (word magic) and animistic worldviews within the show, presenting an animated and animistic world filled with yôkai, ayakashi (spirits, supernatural creatures) and kami (gods). Its affective potential is further considered in its genre, iyashikei, or healing, and presentation of narrative that allows for viewers to be healed through consumption of the text. While seichi junrei rituals and practices often contain sacred and religious qualities, such as visiting sacred sites such as shrines, or when the narrative involves supernatural characters, the narrative of Natsume Yuujincho reflects both qualities, and further, steeps the seichi junrei experience in them, overlapping the fictional world of spirits onto real spaces. As such, fans of Natsume Yuujincho are not only seeking out and visiting sacred locations, but in addition, are e-making and materializing physical representations of yôkai, ayakashi and more through ritual activities, in immersive spaces that blur the boundaries between the real and the fictional.
This article develops vampirology as an analytic paradigm for understanding Serbian history and mythology, proposing that the concept of vampirism surmises the logic of parasitism endemic to globalism, neoliberal ideology and ethnonationalist imaginaries. By investigating how the ‘Balkan Deathworld’ has been manufactured by external Gothic-Orientalist imaginaries and produced by internal ‘dracular’ dynamics, Serbia’s position in a broader system of vampirism influenced by Capital and Western hegemony is evaluated. Ultimately, the suggestion that Serbia is solely responsible for its aggressions in the 1990s is critiqued; instead, Serbia is considered as a focused subject of vampiric powers which define the logic of late capitalist statehood and personhood.
The Arizona town of Sedona is an active center of spiritual tourism and New Age spirituality. Many visitors expect to have some kind of spiritual experience in Sedona. New Age practices available range from vortex tours to crystal healing, meditation, yoga, and shamanic rituals. This paper discusses many of these facets of New Age spirituality, including vortexes and bioresonance therapy. Most of these practices share a common belief in energies working at multiple levels in the world. Therapies at all levels involve unblocking the flow of energy. Like most of the world, businesses in Sedona came to a sudden stop during the COVID pandemic. But the pandemic’s effects were fleeting. Sedona’s spiritual tourism industry continues to grow and unite most of its residents.
This article offers a meticulous reconstruction and analysis of the books by Brinsley Le Poer Trench (1911–1995), an important representative of ancient aliens literature. It is demonstrated that his version of the ancient aliens narrative, as well as his worldview, bear substantial similarities to the narratives of other authors in the field, but also that he has a distinctive interpretation of specific topics. It is also shown that Brinsley Le Poer Trench’s books display a synthesis of ancient aliens motifs (including the explicit acknowledgement and appreciation of Theosophical influence) with UFOlogy.
Death is a sensitive open wound in modern society’s delusion that we have progressed beyond the limits of nature. Death repels us even as it enthralls us. It is hidden from view yet promoted as entertainment. This article examines the way traditional discourse around death is challenged and reshaped through the HBO series Six Feet Under. It examines the conflicting manner in which death and violence is addressed, beginning with, on the one hand, the desensitization to prolific and explicit representations of death and violence in film and television—deaths that occur ‘out there’—and on the other, the private, painful and taboo discussion of death, where emotions and existential fears are suppressed (or at least heavily regulated)—deaths that occur ‘in here’. This article uses close analysis of the deaths that occur in the opening scenes of each episode of Six Feet Under to argue that there is a Six Feet Under kind of death, where the contradictory elements of death discourse are brought together, not for any kind of resolution, but rather to emphasize the confusion and ambiguity that is the human experience of death and grieving.
The author analyzes the relationship between the American and European anti-cult movements and the burgeoning Japanese anti-cult movement in the late twentieth century. The author relies on pre-existing material on the Japanese anti-cult movement and archival material available in the Cult Awareness Network Collection in University of California, Santa Barbara Special Research Collections. The author argues that it was the American anti-cult movement that particularly influenced the growing Japanese anti-cult movement, especially before the Aum Affair of 1995. However, the Japanese anti-cult movement is distinct from the American one, in that there is a separate yet important historical-religious context.
