New publication: Brill chapter on Japanese religious images and visual agency

[Tomoe Steineck]

Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to share my recently published book chapter, “Protest Deities and the Logic of Images: Images as Epistemic Agents in Japanese Religion,” in Esoteric Practices and Alternative Rationalities: A Global Perspective, edited by CAS-E University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

The chapter argues that images in Japanese religion have long functioned as epistemic agents and media of negotiation, enabling communities to assert claims, forge alliances, and contest power. Tracing this “image logic” from medieval protest worship through Edo-period pilgrimage to the nineteenth century, it examines how imperial and Protestant image-aversion, classification, and institutional collecting contributed to the marginalization of vernacular ritual-visual practices. It also considers the afterlives of these displaced visualities in manga, yōkai, and other popular imaginaries of resistance.

The chapter builds on the same museum collection of Japanese religious images examined in my earlier article, “Declaring Buddhism Dead in the 19th Centur: the Meiji oligarchy and protestant mission in Japan a foreign religion. Explorations of an unchartered territory” (EAJP, 2024), while shifting from the Meiji-period entanglement of Protestant mission, theology, and image culture to a broader longue-durée analysis of visual agency and power.

I hope the chapter and paper may be of interest to colleagues working on Japanese religions, visual culture, material religion, museums and collecting, or the history of imperialism.

With best wishes,

Tomoë I. M. Steineck

Visiting Researcher UZH AOI Japanese Studies/ HIJAS Hosei University Tokyo

Associate Lecturer UZH Japanese Studies, East Asian Art History

Fellow Researcher, ERC Synergy Grant Application Cultures of Nature in Early Modern Japan (under review)

Forthcoming Publications:

• Protest Deities and the Logic of Images: Images as Epistemic Agents in Japanese Religion. Alternative Rationalities and Religious Practices in a Global Perspective. (Inaugural issue CAS-E). Brill, July 2026 
• Negotiation Regimes: Mission, Collection, and Visual Agency in Nineteenth-Century Japan. (Monograph, in preparation)