Biography

Paride Stortini is a postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, which he joined after completing a PhD in history of religions at the University of Chicago and a JSPS fellowship at Tokyo University. The project he is developing at Ghent is titled Building Buddhist Heritage in Postwar Japan: The Silk Road between History and Memory at Yakushiji Temple. It explores the concept of “Silk Road” in twentieth century Japan, at the intersection between cultural heritage, religious practices of memorialization and pilgrimage, and media representation of travel and “Buddhist cosmopolitanism,” centering on the case study of the temple and Buddhist community of Yakushiji, Nara Prefecture. Memory plays a central role in this project, as it critically investigates the way Buddhism informs two processes of memory-making: on one side, practices of memorialization of the dead that essentially contribute to the construction of the temple community, and on another side, a sense of generational nostalgia associated with Silk Road imagery across media. It shows the potential of religion to build transnational communities of memory, but also reveals the risk of obfuscating historical memory and wartime responsibilities in the reimagination of a cosmopolitan Buddhist past.

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