Floating Signifiers: The Plural Significance of the Grand Shrine of Ise and the Incessant Re-signification of Shinto

Abstract

According to received understanding, the Grand Shrine of Ise (Ise Jingū 伊勢 神宮), as the center of the Shinto tradition, plays an essential role in the history of Japanese culture. However, premodern documents concerning Ise Shinto show that such understanding are mostly modern and contemporary results of multiple reinterpretations of Ise’s role throughout history. This article proposes a semiotic approach to understand some instances in which aspects of the cultural meanings attributed to the Grand Shrine of Ise—symbolism, rituals, and representations—have been re-contextualized, re-signified, and reinvented. In particular, this article suggests that emphasis on Shinto continuity tends to ignore cultural and discursive contexts and, even more crucially, the distinction between forms (signifiers) and their contents (signified), thus resulting in a more or less voluntary erasure of traces of historical and conceptual change. A semiotic approach will show that much of the Shinto tradition at Ise consists in the preservation, transmission, and repetition of ritualized forms without clearly defined meanings; this aspect in turn has produced an ongoing “quest for significance” regarding the Shinto tradition in general, and Ise in particular. This paper is a contribution toward a different kind of understanding, open to the diversity and plurality of sources, approaches, and sensibilities that characterize the history of Ise and of Shinto in general, away from reductionism that characterizes received discourses on Shinto.

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