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Setting out from Okakura Kakuzō and Ernest Fenollosa's famous "discovery" of the Yumedono Kannon, this article will trace the contested construction of the categories of "religion" (shūkyō) and "fine art" (bijutsu) in Meiji Japan. In religious studies circles, it has become commonplace to think of "religion" as the only disciplinary master category with issues. However, not only was "religion" invented in Japan, but "fine art" was invented there too. Indeed, categories from "culture" to "society" to "politics" have similar issues. Attending to these will help refocus crucial debates away from an obsession with translation and onto more fundamental issues about "cultural categories" as such. This paper will advance the debate by explaining the attendant constructions of "religion" and "fine art" as process social kinds. In doing so, it will showcase the museum and the temple as central sites of materialized disputation over global categories and their local instantiation. It will show how assimilation to the world-system in the long nineteenth century was a complex multi-generational process of negotiation and contestation, producing new hybrid spaces, returns, transformations, and innovations that then reflected back on global systems, changing them in subtle but profound ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers such as Charles Taylor have claimed that selfhood is a distinctly modern phenomenon, associated with inwardness, inner depths, and creativity. In this conception, selfhood is defined in terms of "radical reflexivity", which saw its emergence with the likes of Descartes. Thus, according to Taylor, it is only with modern people that we see the appearance of selfhood and subjectivity, whereas premoderns did not have a notion of the self, because they lacked the essential conceptions of inwardness and reflexivity. The purpose of this article is to challenge and overturn the above thesis by presenting how various historical Sufi–Islamic authors placed "inwardness and reflexivity" at the center of their conceptions of the self, while emphasizing its ambivalent nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]