LECTURER:
Caleb Carter (Kyushu University)
DATE:
January 20, 2023 (Friday)
16:30-18:00 (JST)
VENUE:
東北大学・川内北キャンパス
国際文化研究科棟 101会議室
Tohoku Univ., Kawauchi Campus
Grad. School of Intl. Cult. Studies, r.101
(For directions, please click here)
Please register below for the Zoom link:
https://bit.ly/carter-tohoku
(deadline: Jan. 18)
※ The Lecture will be in English
本講演は英語にて行われる
ABSTRACT:
Caleb Carter’s recent book, A Path into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi (University of Hawai’i Press, 2022), explores the history of Shugendō, a mountain religious tradition in Japan that formed over centuries out of a matrix of Buddhist, continental, and local religious beliefs and practices. Long an object of fascination and intrigue among scholars and the general public, its historical development has long been an enigma. A Path into the Mountains offers a provocative reexamination of the social, economic, and spiritual terrain from which Shugendō arose. It traces this path through the mountains of Togakushi in Nagano prefecture, while situating Shugendō within the broader religious landscape of medieval and early modern Japan. In the first part of this talk, Carter will recount a few stories from Togakushi’s cultural history included in the book that speak to Shugendō’s legacy at large as well as our broader understanding of Japan’s religious past. In the second part, Carter will share some preliminary findings from his next project, an investigation into various intersections between the modern rise of alpinism in Japan and the contemporaneous world of mountain worship. The latter has been largely studied from a folk studies perspective (minzokugaku), aligned with tradition, austerity, piety, and cultural essentialism. In contrast, mountaineering has been viewed as modern, secular, recreational, and international. These assumptions, as this next project aims to demonstrate, are ripe for reappraisal.
ABOUT THE LECTURER:
Caleb Carter is an assistant professor of Japanese religions in the Faculty of Humanities at Kyushu University. His main research centers on the history of Shugendō and more recently on contemporary trends in areas such as power spots (pawāsupotto) and regional restorations of Shugendō. His research interests include space and place, narrative and folklore, women and gender, and ecology. Carter received his MA and PhD from UCLA (Buddhist Studies) and was awarded a Japan Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins before joining the faculty at Kyūdai. He has published articles in History of Religions and in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies and is author of A Path into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi (University of Hawai’i, 2022).
For more information, please contact klautau@tohoku.ac.jp
