Mountains of Time: Historical Consciousness and Sacred Mountains in Japan

This dissertation presents an ethnographic account of mountain asceticism and pilgrimage in Dewa Sanzan, a sacred mountain range in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. I argue that the space of Dewa Sanzan, like that of other sacred mountains in Japan, stands not only in topographical contrast with the urban sprawl in valleys below, but also in temporal contrast with a culturally and historically unique form of capitalist modernity. For contemporary practitioners, mountain ascetic rituals and pilgrimage bend the linear, clock-time of capitalist modernity into a premodern-like cyclical time of annual rebirth in the mountain’s symbolic womb and of ancestral return on mountain summits. Each chapter of this dissertation explores different ways in which Mount Haguro, Gassan, and Mount Yudono, the three mountains of Dewa Sanzan, constitute a spatiotemporal alterity in modern Japanese society. Dewa Sanzan is a place that evokes modes of historical consciousness for visitors, some of which are contested, but all of which reach into the past as imagined. Engagements with the spatialized past of Dewa Sanzan enable modern people to fashion themselves anew, reconnect with ancestors, and gain a critical perspective of society.Ph.D.2021-11-13 00:00:0