My research and teaching revolve around interests in the cultural formation of religion and religious sites with contingent issues regarding narrative and folklore, women and gender, the environment, and modernity. I received my B.A. in Philosophy from Colorado College (2000) and my M.A. (2008) and Ph.D. (2014) in Buddhist Studies from the Asian Languages and Cultures Department at UCLA. Before coming to Kyushu, I taught courses at UCLA and Johns Hopkins University.
My recent book, A Path into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi (University of Hawai’i Press, 2022), offers a fundamental rethinking of how religion forms at the regional and transregional levels. Through an investigation of Mount Togakushi (Nagano Prefecture) from the late thirteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries, I draw on legends, myths, miracle tales, doctrinal works, and travel literature as well as material sources (iconography, stelae, and woodblock prints) in tracing the development of Shugendō, Tendai Buddhism, and Shinto. I focus on three agents of change at Togakushi—narrative, ritual, and institution—that offer a novel approach to examining the formation of religious sites and traditions. The chapters of the book cover subjects that include women’s participation and exclusion from the site, Buddhist asceticism and ritual culture, the economics of pilgrimage, and the importation and localization of religious systems.
My interests in pilgrimage, space and place, and contemporary religious practices have also led me to research and publish on the themes of ‘dark pilgrimage’ in the Edo period, early modern religious place-making, and the present-day phenomenon of ‘power spots’ in Japan.
While continuing to work on Shugendō, I have three projects underway. The first explores religious elements in the emergence of modern mountaineering in Japan. An activity long viewed as a secular sport, I identify social and material links between alpinists and local devotional communities as well as the active assemblage of novel intellectual categories—tradition, sport, religion, spirituality, secularism, and nature—in the formation of alpinism. The second examines the ritual culture of autographic seals (senshafuda) at temples and shrines in Japan. Taking these seals as a form of ‘sacred graffiti,’ I examine their early modern use in pilgrimage practices and contemporary controversies over cultural heritage protection and changing notions of temple proprietorship. Finally, I am investigating the imagined and liminal figure of the mountain ascetic in medieval and early modern Japan. After analyzing medieval examples that oscillate between saint and charlatan, I turn to sixteenth-century Shugendō doctrinal texts that, as I argue, sought to stabilize the ascetic’s reputation and reposition him as an essential member of the Buddhist community.
My graduate seminars at IMAP center on themes regarding pilgrimage, sacred space, narrative, gender, and the environment, but I tend to tailor them to our current students’ research interests. Past seminars include “Mountain Religions,” “Vernacular Figures in Japanese Religions,” “Place in Japanese Religions,” “Buddhism and the Environment,” “Women and Gender in Japanese Religions,” “Japanese Folklore: Methods & Monsters,” “Japan in the Field: Studies and Approaches,” and a translation course on premodern Japanese religious texts.
Publications
A Path into the Mountains: Shugendō and Mount Togakushi. University of Hawai’i Press, 2022.
Select Essays and Articles
“From Hucksters to Holy Men: Reimagining the Mountain Ascetic in Late Medieval Japan.” Journal of Religion in Japan 12/2 (2023), 127–151.
“Whose Place Is It? Layers of Community and Meaning in the Land of Shinto and Power Spots.” In Oxford Handbook of Religious Space and Place, ed. Jeanne Kilde. Oxford University Press, 2022.
“Adding Value (with Limits): Pilgrimage and Women’s Exclusion in Japan’s Sacred Mountains.” Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 2: 2 (2019), 1–30.
“The Demonic Landscape: Oni Legends and the Making of Japan’s Early Modern Countryside.” Japan Forum 31, no. 4 (2019), 467–486.
“Power Spots and the Charged Landscape of Shinto.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 45, no. 1 (2018), 147–175.
“Constructing a Place, Fracturing a Geography: The Case of the Japanese Tendai Cleric Jōin.” History of Religions 56, no. 3 (2017), 289–310.
乗因の作り変えた山王一実神道―戸隠山の位置をめぐって [Jōin’s Transformation of Sannō Ichijitsu Shintō: Considering the Role of Mount Togakushi]. 季刊日本思想史 82 (2017), 90–106.
Media
Interview (podcast): New Books Network, a discussion on A Path into the Mountains (UH Press, 2022)
Interview (podcast): Deep in Japan, a conversation on Shugendō and beyond (October 2022)
Interview (podcast): Beyond Japan Podcast on the topic of ‘power spots’ in contemporary Japan (September 2021)
Interview (website): “Connecting the Past and Present of Shugendo – The Revival of Japan’s Ancient Mountain Ascetic Tradition, Part Two,” by Alena Eckelmann, Buddhistdoor Global (March 2021)