Emplacing A Pilgrimage

Emplacing a Pilgrimage

Looming large over the religious landscape of early modern Japan, the sacred mountain Ōyama had, by the Edo period, gone from secluded spiritual retreat to popular pilgrimage destination. Its importance was not lost on the Tokugawa shogunate, who saw in it an opportunity to reinforce communal ideals and social structures.

Emplaced Belief

Emplaced Belief is an innovative interdisciplinary volume that explores the conceptual and lived relations between the academic fields of religion and heritage. The Contributors adopt a wholistic approach to consider emplacement — a broad interrelation of objects, peoples, histories and places — in the analysis of relations between religion and heritage. To be ‘emplaced’ is to be situated, yet such positioning is the result of multiple conscious and unconscious forces, agencies, discourses, and epistemologies. The volume’s title refers not only to physical locations of import, but also to the role of cultural practices and religious epistemologies in the establishment of religious heritage: the act of emplacement. That is, the religious, social, political and cultural practices that denote ‘heritage’ and the dynamics that revise, reinforce, or remove any such attribution.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage