The Graduate School of International Cultural Studies is hosting a lecture on The Secret World of Shugendō.

Anthropologist and author Shayne A. P. Dahl will discuss his ethnographic study of Dewa Sanzan, the three sacred mountains of Yamagata Prefecture, and of Shugendō, the mountain-ascetic tradition practiced there.

Drawing on his own training and interviews with practitioners, Dahl proposes the concept of "orographic perspectivism" to capture how mountains and people shape one another. He shows the peaks as sites of overlapping - and sometimes competing - experiences: retreat from capitalist modernity, temple-shrine rivalries rooted in Meiji-era policy, and memorialization after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.

Date: July 25, 2026
Time: 4:30 - 6:00 p.m.
Venue: Tohoku University Kawauchi Campus, Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Room 101 (map)

About the Lecturer:

Shayne A. P. Dahl is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Calgary. He specializes in the anthropology of religion, with a focus on Japanese mountain asceticism (Shugendō), Buddhism, and the intersections of history, spirituality and consciousness. His research is based on long-term fieldwork in Japan, but he has also done fieldwork in Mongolia, New Zealand, Peru and among Blackfoot communities in North America.

This book talk is organised by the Department of Japanese Religion and Intellectual History. It is in English and open to everyone. Registration is not required.