Pilgrimage and spirit possession: Reconnecting senses, discourse and subjectivity on Mt Kiso Ontake

Simple item page
dc.contributor.authorPadoan, Tatsuma
dc.contributor.editorCawley, Kevin N.
dc.date.accessioned2022-01-31T14:13:01Z
dc.date.available2022-01-31T14:13:01Z
dc.date.issued2021
dc.date.updated2022-01-28T20:43:00Z
dc.description.abstractWhile the anthropology of pilgrimage shifted its major paradigm from a focus on sacred sites to one on movement, investigation of sensory bodies, as moving sites for an encounter with spirits and deities, has rarely been undertaken. On the other side the anthropology of senses, although providing a contribution to an understanding of the role of perception in social life, has frequently privileged embodied experience over language and discourse. It might be argued that such an exclusion of discourse from senses has involuntarily reiterated a Modern Divide between language and body, traceable back to a Protestant ideology of separation between interiority and exteriority, belief and ritual. In this paper I will explore the role of language, body and senses in pilgrimage, trying to look beyond such a Western epistemological divide. In so doing, I will focus on a contemporary pilgrimage in Japan, on Mt Kiso Ontake (3067m), where pilgrims visit spirits’ abodes (reijinhi) in order to hear ancestors’ voices coming from the possessed body of a medium (nakaza). Through an ethnographic and semiotic analysis of somatic and oracular interactions between ancestors and pilgrims, I will show how, by opening the individual body of the medium, an intersensory, collective body of human and nonhuman members of the group is constructed. We will thus follow the body-voice of the medium by considering it as a “moving shrine” where, through language, sounds, screams and gestures occurring during the séances (oza), an aesthesic contagion is actualised among pilgrims, and new subjectivities are produced, shattering supposed divisions between sense and senses, discourse and affect.en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionPublished Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationPadoan, T. (2021) 'Pilgrimage and spirit possession: Reconnecting senses, discourse and subjectivity on Mt Kiso Ontake', Irish Journal of Asian Studies, 7, pp. 39-57.en
dc.identifier.endpage57en
dc.identifier.issn2009-8448
dc.identifier.journaltitleIrish Journal of Asian Studiesen
dc.identifier.startpage39en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/12509
dc.identifier.volume7en
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherUniversity College Corken
dc.relation.urihttps://irishjournalofasianstudies.org/current-issue-vol-7-2021/
dc.rights© 2021, Irish Journal of Asian Studies. All rights reserved.en
dc.subjectPilgrimageen
dc.subjectJapanese religionsen
dc.subjectSpirit possessionen
dc.subjectEthnosemioticsen
dc.subjectEnunciationen
dc.subjectAesthesisen
dc.subjectSubjectivityen
dc.titlePilgrimage and spirit possession: Reconnecting senses, discourse and subjectivity on Mt Kiso Ontakeen
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)en
Files
Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
PADOAN_Pilgrimage_and_spirit_possession.pdf
Size:
484.14 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Published Version
Download
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
license.txt
Size:
2.71 KB
Format:
Item-specific license agreed upon to submission
Description:
Download
Collections
Study of Religions - Journal Articles