Four Case Studies in Comparison and Analogy: Political and Religious Culture, Conversion, Genealogy, and Time in Latin Europe and Medieval Japan

Our article follows two related objectives. We, first, reconsider the relationship between religion and politics by eschewing the uniform modern State–Church model and questioning its Eurocentric tenets. To do so, we focus on the Middle Ages and pair our decentring perspective with a comparison between Latin Europe in the 9th to 13th centuries and medieval Japan from the late Heian period to the Kamakura and early Muromachi eras (10th to 14th centuries). While comparisons between medieval Japan and Western Europe are well established, we propose, furthermore, to reassess them in light of a comparative approach that is informed less by affinities than by analogies following the pioneering work of the British anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. In our case, we examine the analogy between the conceptual pairs, regnum vs. sacerdotium and ōbō vs. buppō, i.e., imperial vs. Buddhist law. We operationalise in particular Strathern’s strategy of negation, i.e., the productive acknowledgement that some cultural traits cannot truly be present in another culture. Starting with affinities and moving towards analogies, we show, first, that European as well as Japanese binaries admit declensions that extend to the hostile subordination or even violent rejection of one of the terms. Both traditions, for instance, justified armed violence in defence of the sacred, whether through the conversion of kings in Latin Christendom or the conversion of kami in Japan. Such parallels suggest a common denominator in the political cultures of Eurasia’s extremes. Second, though, Japanese persons and metapersons (human and non-human alike) do not occupy fixed positions within the binary, as we show in our case study on conversions, nor do they oscillate between them in the manner of Gregory VII and Henry IV (who could be, by turns, co-rulers of Christ’s body, antagonists, or even embodiments of Satan). As the third case study on paternities demonstrates, Japanese figures traverse a multiplicity of roles, their beings marked by the traces of earlier lives and relationships. Spiritual paternities, for example, unfold not through linear genealogy but through reincarnation cycles, where a tennō or retired emperor (between the late eleventh century and circa 1300, the actual leader of the imperial clan) might father a Buddha, a dragon, or a tengu—each transformation redefining the boundaries of authority itself. The question of time further complicates any facile alignment. This is the object of the fourth case study in which we contrast Noh theatre and European crusade reenactments, two modes of ritual performance that inscribe political-theological imaginaries into historical experience. In Japan, Noh staged the return of warrior ghosts (or clinging spirits), their unresolved violence ritually propitiated within a cyclical temporality that allowed past and present to coexist. European crusade reenactments, by contrast, collapsed history into an apocalyptic present, framing the 1099 conquest of Jerusalem as both a past type and a future antetype—a divine script awaiting fulfilment. These divergences underscore how each culture’s regime of historicity shaped its political representations, performing the sacred anew in each generation.