ところで as ところ + で

Question

A sentence from this

「神道」が死を排除したところで成り立っているとすれば、その成立は古墳時代以前になかったことになります。

strikes me as a little different from how the collocation is normally used, and amenable to being interpreted as a combination of two separate elements ところ + で, where the ところで seems more like ことで, as indicating a method to do something.

Though it is possible too to parse this ところで as a normal one expressing the time relation between two actions (排除した→成立する), that's a somewhat inadequate construal for me.

A search in BCCWJ 中納言 yielded results that are disparate, uncomparable from the sentence above, so I'm not certain about my understanding of and guessing on this sentence, including this ところで.

Answer 1

It means more literally at the place where rather than temporal order. But the place is an abstract location/realm.

Literally speaking, the sentence says Shinto 'works' at the place where death is excluded. More idiomatically, it says that Shinto's rituals/teachings etc. assume absence of death or simply paraphrases that Shito does not treat death as claimed in other parts.