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Walking the Sutra: A semiotic theory of pilgrimage
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Date
2023-10-13
Authors
Padoan, Tatsuma
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Routledge
Published Version
Abstract
This chapter intends to map, from a semiotic perspective, the interconnections between ethnography, translation, and pilgrimage, by exploring the contemporary practice and revitalisation of a premodern ascetic route in Katsuragi, linked to the 28 sutra mounds of the Lotus Sutra (Katsuragi nijūhasshuku no kyōzuka). To analyse this pilgrimage, the chapter will focus on its actional spheres – targets, subjects, sources, and evaluators of pilgrimage considered as dynamic positions or ‘actants’ . More specifically, it will examine how these positions are constructed and negotiated by human and nonhuman actors, namely pilgrims, places, institutions, deities, and other entities. By exploring the actional spheres of pilgrimage, and the networks and hierarchies emerging from them, the chapter will investigate not only how pilgrims constantly translate a Buddhist scripture into a landscape by walking it, but also how they translate ascetic values acquired in the mountains into their everyday lives, at home and at work, in the private and public domains. Finally, it will analyse the role of ethnographers as translators, themselves engaged in making sense of the flow of pilgrimage through their participant observation and their bodily experience of the environment while learning to perceive a ‘semiotics of the natural world’.
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Keywords
Semiotics of pilgrimage , Paris school semiotics , Anthropology of pilgrimage , Actor-network-theory , Pilgrimage as method , Ethnography , Translation , Sense and signification , Actants , Aesthesis , Semiotics of the natural world , Michael Taussig , Algirdas Greimas , Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Katsuragi Shugen , Japanese mountain asceticism
Citation
Padoan, T. (2024) 'Walking the Sutra: A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage', in Katić, M. and Eade, J. (eds.) Approaching Pilgrimage: Methodological Issues Involved in Researching Routes, Sites, and Practices, London: Routledge, pp. 59-76. available: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003137764.