Speaker

Dr Tatsuma Padoan (University College Cork, Ireland)

Chair

Dr Benedetta Lomi (University of Bristol)

Abstract

In his recent book, Simon Coleman (2021) has advocated the need to capture zones of operation which “derive yet simultaneously deviate from conventional or expected orientations and stances” in pilgrimage practice, by using the concept of “laterality”. In my paper, I wish to show how this concept may have interesting connections with another important domain of practice, rarely addressed in the anthropology of pilgrimage: the dimension of learning. In their study on situated learning, Lave and Wenger (1991) have in fact argued that every form of learning is a social practice producing individual and collective subjectivities, and learners usually acquire skills by laterally engaging in “legitimate peripheral participation”. By connecting these ideas to studies on learning in anthropology of religion (Berliner and Sarrò 2009) and semiotics (Landowski 2004), we will see how the concept of legitimate peripheral participation bears striking resemblances with laterality, opening interesting perspectives on pilgrimage practice. I will explore these themes through my long-term ethnography in Katsuragi, Japan, among pilgrims engaged in the contemporary revitalisation of a premodern ascetic pilgrimage, linked to the twenty-eight sutra mounds of the Lotus Sutra (Katsuragi nijūhasshuku no kyōzuka). By following the situated learning activities of these ascetic pilgrims in their lateral attitudes and courses of action, we will see not only how pilgrimage becomes a deeply adaptive and dynamic practice, including improvisation and adjustment, but also how by learning a pilgrimage and acquiring skills in often unpredictable situations, practitioners learn how to become pilgrims.

Bio

Tatsuma Padoan (PhD, Venice) is Lecturer in East Asian Religions at University College Cork, and a research associate at SOAS, University of London. As an anthropologist and a semiotician, he has worked on ritual—including asceticism, ritual apprenticeship, pilgrimage, religious materiality and spirit possession—as well as on the study of design practices and the politics of urban space. His most recent publications include: “Recalcitrant Interactions: Semiotic Reflections on Fieldwork among Mountain Ascetics” (Acta Semiotica 1, 2, 2021: 84-119); and “On the Semiotics of Space in the Study of Religions: Theoretical Perspectives and Methodological Challenges” (in Sign, Method, and the Sacred: New Directions in Semiotic Methodologies for the Study of Religion, edited by Thomas-Andreas Põder and Jason Van Boom, 189-214. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021).

 

*After the seminar talk and Q&A, there will be a short reception with drinks and nibbles.

All are welcome!