Researching Place, Emplacing the Researcher: Reflections on the Making of a Documentary on a Pilgrimage Confraternity

Abstract

This essay reflects on the roles of the researcher, gender, place, and nostalgia in the making of an ethnographic documentary film on a contemporary pilgrimage confraternity. Every year the group visits Oyama, a sacred mountain in central Kanagawa Prefecture, on the occasion of the mountain-opening ceremony on 27 July. The Ohana Confraternity mainly consists of members working at two manufacturing companies in Tokyo. A sense of belonging to the group is mostly based on professional and personal relationships rather than a common sense of faith. The yearly pilgrimage is an example of how contemporary corporations use religious rituals to foster social relations and promote a productive work ethic among their employees. The presence of a foreign researcher and a local archivist influenced the ritual activities of the confraternity in many, sometimes unexpected, ways. Gender determined the place of individual members (including the researcher) in the group and their mode of association with the confraternity. The group's approach to traditions and rituals of the pilgrimage was nostalgic yet playful and malleable. KEYWORDS: Oyama-Ohanako-yamabiraki-misogi-furi Shrine-Fudo Myoo- kekkai-nyonin kinsei-nostalgia (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) Place, in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct. This is the baseline proposition from which I start. The only interesting question that can then be asked is: by what social process(es) is place constructed? David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time-the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia ACCORDING to M. Eliade, sacred places are sanctified through hierophany, a divine manifestation empowering this-worldly space with other-worldly qualities. An Eliadian sacred place is timeless and divorced from profane places (Eliade 1961, 20-29). This Eliadian understanding of the sacred has colored the ways in which scholars of Japanese religion have viewed sacred mountains in Japan. For example, the folklorist Hori Ichiro proposed three basic typological aspects of mountain cults in Japan. The first is the veneration of volcanoes and other conically shaped mountains as the residence or embodiment of the divine. Second, mountains were revered as watersheds and sources of water, fertility and, by implication, material wealth. Third, mountains were regarded as the realm of spirits and the dead. As abodes of divinities, spirits, and the dead, mountains were regarded as portals to other worlds or as an axis mundi, the embodiment of the entire universe like the mythical Buddhist peak Mt. Sumeru (Hori 1966, 1-23). During the past few decades, scholars of cultural geography, cultural anthropology, and religious studies have questioned the timelessness of sacred places and the rigid distinction of the sacred and the profane posited by Eliade. Instead they have suggested that sacred places are culturally and socially constructed.1 John Eade and Michael Sallnow, for example, argue for an approach to the study of pilgrimage sites that shifts the focus from the place to the person: pilgrimage shrines are sites where divergent religious discourses collide as pilgrims and shrine authorities each aim to assert their meanings and perceptions (Eade and Sallnow 1991, 5.10). This essay is a case study of a sacred mountain in central Kanagawa Prefecture on the western edge of the Kant. Plain that is a popular regional pilgrimage and hiking destination. This mountain, Oyama, serves as an illuminating example of how a sacred place is maintained and created in a complex process that involves pilgrims, innkeepers, priests, and researchers. In this sense, many divergent voices continually negotiate the meanings of Oyama's social and physical space. …