THE TERM “RELIGION” IN THE CONTEXT OF THE “GLOCAL” APPROACH TO INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN RUSSIA AND JAPAN

Abstract

The article analyzes the denotations and connotations associated with the term “religion” in Russian and Japanese sociocultural contexts from the perspective of “glocal religious studies”. In Russian culture, the term “religion” has been fixed since the beginning of the 18th century, acquiring the forms of two basic approaches, the first of which is the analysis of the socio-historical phenomena (denotations) themselves, which are referred to as “religion as such” (from non-Orthodoxy to atheism), while the second focuses on the study of the connotations of the lexeme “religion”. In Japanese culture, the European concept of “religion” has been affirmed since the second half of the 19th century, being associated among the majority of the population with the phenomena of Christianity, Buddhism, and new religious movements external to popular Shinto traditions, often accompanied by negative connotations. Historically, the term “religion”, which arose in European culture, has been associated with Christian connotations for about 1,500 years, dating back to the pre-Christian era of the development of Roman culture and the work of Cicero, who separated the local connotations of understanding “terrible” and “dangerous” that existed in popular beliefs (“superstitions”) from “truly terrible” and “dangerous for the state” in the elite consciousness of philosophers, defining religion as “ serving the highest order of nature ”. Religion emerged as the social ideal of solidarity, which needs philosophical understanding of both the ancient traditions of the people (“Mos Maiorum”) and its descriptions by “theologians” (poets and philosophers), where opinions based on fear of the invisible forces that rule the universe could be recognized as “superstitions”, contrasting with the critical thoughts of intellectuals of different philosophical schools “about the nature of the gods”, helping toreasonably maintain the harmony of “PaxDeorum”, while not falling into the one-sidedness of “atheism”, which was seen as a threat to the social order, law and justice.

Keywords

• denotations
• connotations
• the term “religion”
• the phenomenon of religion
• russia
• japan
• religious studies