Family Resemblances: Memorial Images and the Face of Kinship

In some northern Tohoku institutions, a dedicated hanayomeningyō (bride doll), infused with the spirit of the bodhisattva Jizō, functions as a spirit spouse for the unquiet soul of a child or youth who died before marriage. Although the figurine used is the opposite sex of the deceased, the doll's face is widely believed to come to resemble that of the dead person. These imputed cross-cutting "family resemblances" (in Wittgenstein's sense) emerge from the enigmatic double life of ritual images, which may simultaneously be experienced as representations of distant beings and as efficacious entities in their own right. By building up an extended web of partial associations among the living, the dead, and memorial images, those who dedicate and pray to hanayomeningyō help regulate relations between categorical domains of existence. In "facing" the dead, the living thus mimetically represent and reproduce generative principles of human kinship.