Summary: | Under the assumption that religious concepts are like any other concepts, ethnographic
studies have been able to provide plausible explanations for a wide range of religious beliefs and
behaviour. One under-studied question asks how such concepts help form specific expectations about
social life in modern communities. Here, we focus on how a micro-community in a southern Japanese
village edits inherited religious concepts to help make solutions to a social problem intelligible. In
section one, we study the variables: the religious concept, the problem, and the micro-community. In
section two we turn to the details of the editing of the concept.
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