Negotiations of the Sacred: Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri and the Shifting Boundaries of a Japanese Festival

Negotiations of the Sacred offers a fresh perspective on one of Japan’s most famous festivals, the Gion Matsuri, held in Kyoto in July.Dating back more than a thousand years, the festival today features the parading of dozens of elaborate floats and portable Shinto shrines, accompanied by thousands of participants, through more than thirty downtown neighborhoods linked to Yasaka Shrine.Based on extensive fieldwork, this is the first book-length socio-anthropological analysis of the celebrated festival, one that examines it during a critical moment in its recent history: The 2014 reinstatement of the Gion’s second float procession (ato matsuri) after a fifty-year hiatus. Elisabetta Porcu follows the complex negotiations behind the festival and the reinstatement of the ato matsuri as she investigates the boundaries between sacred and secular geographies (the temporary shrine and governmental buildings) and the areas where these boundaries blur, such as the constitutional separation of re