Ellen Schattschneider

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Departments/Programs

Anthropology
Comparative Humanities
East Asian Studies
International and Global Studies
Religious Studies

Degrees

University of Chicago, Ph.D.
University of Chicago, M.A.
Sarah Lawrence College, B.A.

Expertise

Religion. Psychoanalytic theory. Memory and trauma. Museum Anthropology, exhibition development and curation. Culture and mental illness. Anthropology of the body. Commodification. East Asia. Japan.

Profile

Please visit my new faculty profile page.

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. Webpage

Courses Taught

ANTH	80a	Anthropology of Religion
ANTH	105a	Myth and Ritual
ANTH	154a	Culture and Mental Illness
ANTH	159a	Museums and Public Memory
ANTH	164b	Cancer and Community
ANTH	180b	Playing Human: Persons, Objects, Imagination
ANTH	182b	Engaged Anthropology
ANTH	201a	History of Anthropological Thought
ANTH	207b	Trauma: Theory and Experience

Awards and Honors

Norman Fund for Faculty Research (2015)

Brandeis University Senior Faculty Research Fellowship (Spring 2014) (2013)

Mandel Center for the Humanities, Interdicsiplinary Teaching Award, for team taught courses (with Prof. Drick Roosevelt) (2011)

CORST Prize (Committee on Research, Scholarship and Teaching, American Psychoanalytic Association) (2010)

Slberger Fellow, Boston Psychonalytic Society and Institute (2008 - 2009)

Fulbright Research Fellowship in Japan, 2003-2004 (2003 - 2004)

Mazer Grant. Brandeis University (2003)

Northeast Asia Council (Association of Asian Studies). Small grant for research in Japan (2003)

Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University, 2002-2003 (2002)

Social Science Research Council, Advanced Research Grant for Research in Japan (2002)

Scholarship

Schattschneider, Ellen (contributing editor). "Art Beyond Quarantine, exploring artistic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic around the world." (2021): <https://artbeyondquarantine.blogspot.com/>.

Schattschneider, Ellen (lead author). "Exhibition Development as Restorative Future-Making: Community Co-Curation in the Struggle against Sexual Violence.." Unimaginable Worlds: Methodologies of the Impossible. Ed. Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston and Mark Auslander, editors. Palgrave Press, 2021

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Anthropologies of Personhood." The Sage Handbook of Cultural Anthropology. Ed. Edited by Lene Pedersen and Lisa Cliggett. SAGE Publications., 2021

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Back into the Light: Water and the Indigenous Uncanny in Northeastern Japan." Sacred Waters: A Cross-Cultural Compendium of Hallowed Springs and Holy Wells. Ed. edited by Celeste Ray. Routledge an imprint of Taylor and Francis, Abington, UK, 2019

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Knotted Energies: Entanglement as Symbolic Action." American Anthropological Association Meetings, San Jose, CA. 2018.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "The Empire’s Little Sisters: Labor and Emotion in Wartime Japan." Invited lecture in "Our Daily Work Series" (February 12, 2018). Michigan State University

Schattschneider, Ellen. "The Hidden World: Reflections on the Work of Jim Shaw." Invited Lecture. Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University. (January 11, 2018).

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Uncanny Presences: ‘Comfort Women’ Statues in the Global Public Square, in panel, "Representing the Unrepresentable: ‘Comfort Women’ in Literature, Film and Art"." Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, (March 25, 2018).

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Uncanny Presences: ‘Comfort Women’ Statues in the Global Public Square." Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, 2018.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Bending the Body to Material Presence: Ascetic Discipline and Apprenticeship." Symposium on Japanese Craft and Performance Traditions. Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University. (November 7, 2017).

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Faces of Motherhood: Figuring the Maternal in Wartime Japan." Presented at Enigmas of Attachment and Detachment: A Symposium Honoring Dr. Kathleen Barlow’s Retirement from Teaching. Central Washington University. (May 25, 2017).

Schattschneider, Ellen. "'The Garrison of a Conquered City': Revisiting the Ambivalence of Feeling in Wartime Japan." Presented at: Transgressing Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Culture, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology A Festschrift in Honor of Robert A. Paul. Emory University. February 29, 2016.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Landscape, Personhood, and Sacred Image Making: Envisioning Other Worlds." Images of the Sacred: Paradoxes of Presence and Distance. Museum of Culture and Environment, Central Washington University

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Between the Rising Sun and the Sacred Mountain: Asceticism and Political Consciousness in Tsugaru, Japan." Pomona College. November 6, 2015.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Dignity and the Ambivalent Object in Japan, 1908-1935." Presented in the the panel Dignity and the Ethics of Social Struggle, at the American Anthropology Association Annual Meeting. Denver, CO. November 21, 2015.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Reassembling the Dead: Doll Offerings and Wartime Loss in Modern Japan." Pomona College. November 6, 2015.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "The Economics of Pain: Melancholia, Nostalgia and the Human Figurine in Japanese Historical Consciousness." Presented at the invited conference, Nostalgia: The Many Forms of an Emotion. Boston College. November 13, 2015.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "The Return of the White Geese and the Weeping Well—Towards a Critical Tōhoku Studies." The Critical Tōhoku Studies Invited Seminar. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles. 1/19/15.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "The Will of Objects: Persons, Things and Actors in Modern Japan.." Brandeis Anthropology Research Colloquium. Brandeis University. September 18, 2015.

Schattschneider, Ellen. Binding Culture: Living Landscapes and Material Life in Northern Luzon, Philippines. Curator Show, April 9 - June 13, 2015. The Museum of Culture and Environment, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Gender, Aesthetics and Material Culture in the Northern Philippines. Invited Lecture, Department of Anthropology, Central Washington University. 4/10/14.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Review of The Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Modern Japan." Rev. of The Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Modern Japan, by Barbara Ambrose. Monumenta Nipponica vol. Volume 69, #2 2014: 309-14.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "“3.11’s Re-imagined Communities: The Marginalized Dead and Japanese Landscapes of the Living.”." American Anthropological Association, Annual Meeting, Washington D.C.. 12/6/14.

Schattschneider, Ellen. ""Clocks for Seeing”: Photographic Registrations of the Visible Invisible in Modern Japan." Presented in the Panel “Regimes of Invisibility”, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA. 11/18/12.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Adopting the Fetish: War Memory and Uncanny Kinship in Modern Japan.” The Religion and Culture Forum, University of Chicago Divinity School (April)." (2013)

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Funeral Games: Mimesis and Memorialization in the Arts of 3.11." Presented at the panel, “Art and 3.11 Memorialization”, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan. 7/1/13.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Narrating the Nuclear (invited discussant)." American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL. 11/17/13.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "“The deep crack in their hearts”: Destruction and Return in the Aftermath of the 3/11 Tsunami." Presented in the Panel “Uncanny Returns”, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL. 11/16/13.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Adopting the Fetish: War Memory and Uncanny Kinship in Modern Japan.." Invited Lecture, Department of Anthropology, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA. February 2012.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Burying the Enemy:Transposition and Alterity in the 'War Without Mercy'." American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. (November 2011).

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Review of Bethel: Community Schizophrenia in Northern Japan.." General Anthropology Volume 19. #1 (2012).

Schattschneider, Ellen. "The Fetish Goes to War: Disavowal and the Family Romance in Modern Japan." CORST Prize Lecture (Committee on Research, Scholarship and Teaching, American Psychoanalytic Association), Waldorf Astoria, New York City. January 13, 2011.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "'Ambassadors with Terrible Faces': Sacrificing Alternate Selfhoods in 1943 Japan.." Invited Lecture, Vanderbilt University, Asian Studies Lecture Series. November 4, 2010.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Re-circulating Traumatic Authenticity: Fetishism and Transitional Phenomena in Japanese World War Two Reenactments." Presented in the panel Circulation and Reenactment: Mimesis in the Play of History. American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans. (November 19).

Schattschneider, Ellen. "“Giving Birth to the Dead:" Fetishism and Transitional Phenomena in an Okinawan Memorial Rite” Presented in the panel, “Cultural Imaginaries: Fantasy in Culture,”." American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting,. Philadelphia, PA. November 2009.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "“The Fetish Goes to War: Disavowal and the Family Romance in Modern Japan.”." Invited Lecture, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. November 14, 2009.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Memory Work in the Shadow of the A-Bomb: Transitional Objects and Circuits of Trauma.." Department of Anthropology Invited Seminar, Mt. Holyoke College. March 12.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Memory Work in the Shadow of the A-Bomb: Transitional Objects and Circuits of Trauma.." Bi-annual meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, Asilomar, CA. May 28.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "The Anthropology of Exile, Displacement and Dislocation: Notes on Alienation and Transitional Phenomena (Co-authored with Mark Auslander)." Society for Biblical Literature annual conference: Warfare in Ancient Israel section, Boston, MA. November 25.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "The Work of Sacrifice in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: The Enigma of Fascist Aesthetics at Yasukuni Shrine." The Culture of Japanese Fascism. Ed. Tansman, Alan. Duke University Press, 2009

Schattschneider, Ellen. "“The Work of Sacrifice in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: The Enigma of Fascist Aesthetics at Yasukuni Shrine.” In The Culture of Japanese Fascism, edited by Alan Tansman. (Duke University Press)." 2009 ed., 2009

Schattschneider, Ellen. "The Bloodstained Doll: Violence and the Gift in Wartime Japan." The Journal of Japanese Studies Summer (2005).

Schattschneider, Ellen. "“The Enigma of Fascist Aesthetics at Yasukuni Shrine.” [in Japanese] in Gendai Shiso (Journal of Contemporary Thought) August." (2005).

Studying the Anthropology of Women and Religion in Japan. Schattschneider, Ellen. Japan News - Online Publication, 2004.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Book Review of Helen Hardacre: "Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Japan"." Journal of Asian Studies 63. 4 (2004): 1134-6.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Family Resemblaces: Memorial Images and the Face of Kinship." Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 30. 1-2 (2004).

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Response to: Masamichi S. Inoue. "We Are Okinawans but of a Different Kind: New/Old Social Movements and the U.S. Military in Okinawa"." Current Anthropology 45. 1 (2004): 99-101.

Virtual exhibition on Akakura Mountain Shrine. Schattschneider, Ellen. On Line Publication, 2003.

Schattschneider, Ellen. Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain.. Duke University Press, 2003.

Schattschneider, Ellen. "Buy me a bride: Death and exchange in northern Japanese bride doll marriage." American Ethnologist 28. 4 (2001).