Ellen Schattschneider
Brown 219
Department of Anthropology
Brandeis University
P.O. Box 549110, MS 006
Waltham, MA 02454-9110
(781) 736-2219
eschatt@brandeis.edu
Background and Description
Ellen Schattschneider is a sociocultural anthropologist 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. Since 1991, her principal ethnographic work has been conducted in the Tsugaru region of northern Tohoku, Japan. During 2003-04, while a Fulbright scholar in Japan, she conducted field and archival research on memories of the Pacific War, especially on collective representations of the kamikaze/tokkotai. 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 first book, Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain (Duke University Press, April 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. Her current book project, Facing the Dead: Japan and its Dolls in the Mirror of War, examines the significance of dolls and human figurines in popular Japanese experiences and memories of World War II. Dr. Schattschneider has recent and forthcoming articles in such journals as Ethos, American Ethnologist, The Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, and The Journal of Japanese Studies. Her courses include, "Culture, Gender and Power in East Asia," "The Anthropology of Religion," and "Myth and Ritual." 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 at Kawashima Textile School and curating textile arts exhibitions in North America and in the Philippines. She retains personal and academic interests in weaving, painting and gardening. She is married to anthropologist Mark Auslander, and has spent time with him in field research sites in Zambia, South Africa, and rural Georgia.