Scholarship and Biography
Ellen Schattschneider is a sociocultural anthropologist and Associate Professor at Brandeis University, specializing in psychoanalytic, phenomenological and practice approaches to culture. She has strong ethnographic interests in East Asia, especially Japan. She received undergraduate training in philosophy, psychology and anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College, and graduate training in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her principal ethnographic work has been conducted in the Tsugaru region of northern Tohoku, Japan (1991-92, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2003-04, 2013-present).
Dr. Schattschneider's academic writings give particular attention to ritual performance, gender and embodiment, spirit mediumship, sacred landscapes, visuality and the power of images, popular religious experience and comparative capitalist cultures. Her book, Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain (Duke University Press, 2003) explores healing, self-fashioning and embodied psychodynamic processes on a sacred landscape associated with a Shinto shrine founded by a rural Japanese woman in the 1920s.
She is concluding a book-length research project which examines contemporary Japanese practices of spirit marriage and doll dedication, with close attention to traumatic popular memories of World War II and its legacies. Dr. Schattschneider has also begun several new research projects:
Understanding Automata in Comparative and Historical Perspective: building on earlier work on dolls and human figurines in Japan, with close attention to the emergence of mechanical puppets or automata (karakuri ningyo) in early modern Japan, and in contemporary practices including robotics;
Gender and Citizen Science Advocacy in Northeastern Japan: Building on fieldwork in rural communities impacted by the 2011 triple disaster in northeastern Japan, I will undertake exploratory fieldwork with several citizen-science groups engage in effective radiation monitoring of water and foodstuffs.
Aesthetic Production and Anti-sexual Violence Campaings in Global Perspective: traces emerging networks at the intersection of art and popular campaigns that seek to bring to light historical and contemporary instances of gender-based violence.
Her recent awards and distinctions include an award from the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Research and Teaching (CORST) for the best academic paper employing psychoanalytic theory (2010), a Fulbright fellowship for research in Japan (2003-04), a Senior Fellowship at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions (2002-03), and research funding from the Social Sciences Research Council and the Northeast Asia Council of the Asian Studies Association, and receipt of the Silberger Fellowship at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
Dr. Schattschneider is deeply committed to interdisciplinary conversations among those working in anthropology, religious studies, psychoanalytic studies and the arts. Before becoming an anthropologist, she worked as a textile artist and designer, organizing indigenous textile cooperatives in the northern Philippines, studying kimono weaving in Kyoto, Japan, at the Kawashima Textile School and curating exhibitions in North America and in the Philippines.