Ainu Creed and Cult

Neil Gordon Munro was a physician and archaeologist who lived among and studied the Ainu people of Japan for decades, and this book, published posthumously by Columbia University Press after being edited from his research notes, documents Ainu religious belief and ritual based on his own direct long term observation. Its strength is sustained firsthand access at a time when Ainu religious practice was not otherwise well recorded for an English reading audience, drawing on Munro's own fieldwork rather than secondhand report. Its limit is that, compiled and published after Munro's death from his notes rather than a finished manuscript he prepared himself, and reflecting one researcher's mid twentieth century observations, it documents a specific historical period of Ainu practice rather than the tradition's more recent state.