Pilgrimage studies is a genre of scholarship fraught with conflicts over theoretical models. On the one hand, you have those who would have every instance of pilgrimage conform to a single, universal model. This view can be found in Edith Turner's entry “Pilgrimage: An Overview” in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 2004). Drawing on Victor Turner's model of pilgrimages, consisting of separation, liminality, and reaggregation generating a sense of communitas, Edith Turner's contention is that “whatever the site, whatever the culture, the general features of a pilgrim's journey are remarkably similar.” This transhistorical, transcultural view in effect imposes a model of Western Christian notions of pilgrimage onto all religions, which assimilate diverse phenomena into a theoretical discourse that does not understand specific pilgrimages on their own terms.
In contrast, in their introduction to Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), editors John Eade and Michael Sallnow reject this universal view of pilgrimage and instead unpack the category into historically and culturally specific behaviors and meanings. In Emplacing a Pilgrimage, Barbara Ambros embraces Eade and Sallnow's approach; influenced by the work of Allan Grapard and Helen Hardacre, she utilizes the particularities of Ōyama as a pilgrimage site and its physical, institutional, and economic position within the larger Kantō region to provide “a lens through which to view the early modern Japanese religious landscape” (p. 3).
Ambros presents her reader with a narrative of Ōyama's assimilation into the sectarian Buddhist hierarchy fostered by the Tokugawa regime, the political and sectarian contestation surrounding Ōyama's ritual specialists, and Ōyama's conversion to a Sect Shinto organization under the Meiji regime. Throughout, she argues that the pilgrimage to Ōyama fundamentally reinforced the social structures of village and urban life, and reshaped the economic infrastructure of the Kantō plain during the early modern period. In this way, Ambros shows that the Ōyama pilgrimage stands distinct from other Japanese pilgrimages, such as Shinkoku or Ise, that served to subvert the government's authority. Ambros argues that scholars such as Carmen Blacker have taken the solitary, mendicant pilgrimages of Shinkoku and Ise as the archetype of Japanese pilgrimage. Ambros endeavors to problematize this view by showing that Ōyama stands outside the archetype. At the same time, she avoids arguing that Ōyama is representative of Japanese pilgrimage, and keeps her attention focused on revealing diversity.
Emplacing a Pilgrimage is concerned with four narrative streams. In the initial three chapters, Ambros follows the transformation of Ōyama from a remote mountain retreat for yamabushi and Buddhist monks in the medieval period to an early modern pilgrimage destination and site of Buddhist institutional authority. This narrative has three components: the “taming” of Ōyama by Shingon Buddhists with bakufu support; the rise and fall of Shingon influence on Ōyama, as told through the succession of abbots and their various accomplishments (or lack thereof); and the development of the oshi at Ōyama, a class of ritual specialists linked institutionally and economically to pilgrimage. In building this narrative, Ambros quotes and paraphrases early modern and medieval accounts of Ōyama, such as the Ōyamadera engi, which details the taming of Ōyama's dangerous kami by the Buddhist monk Rōben (689–773). Ambros also skillfully employs artists' renderings of Ōyama at various points in its development. She allows the reader to see the taming of Ōyama through art from the Ōyamadera engi and contrasts its imagined early, wild appearance with renderings of the orderly temple compounds as they existed in the nineteenth century. This use of folklore and material history is particularly effective from a rhetorical perspective in conveying a complex and nuanced history.
Next, Ambros focuses on the pilgrimage to Ōyama during the early modern period, as well as the pilgrims and ritual specialists who participated in and facilitated its various activities. Chapters 4 and 5 detail the management of the pilgrimage by ritual specialists and the regional impact of the pilgrims and their confraternities, respectively. In particular, Ambros presents the Ōyama pilgrimage as a major stimulus for improving and increasing the infrastructure of roads in the Kantō plain. Ōyamamichi, roads leading to Ōyama, acted as secondary and tertiary roads complementing the major highways. Additionally, the increased traffic to Ōyama on these roads gave rise to an increase in inns and ferries.
Ambros argues that there were various types of pilgrimage to Ōyama characterized by different destinations, practices, and motivations. For instance, year-round pilgrimages to Ōyama Fudo on the central slope were typically means to healing or gaining protection. In contrast, the summer Sekison festival, in which the summit was opened to male pilgrims, was characterized by numerous purification rituals en route and culminated in pilgrims gaining blessings from the summit's deities and the Shingon clergy. Drawing from early modern textual accounts of the pilgrimage, Ambros deconstructs the pilgrimage to Ōyama into a multiplicity of motivations, practices, and destinations.
The third narrative stream of the book focuses on the evolution of Ōyama's various deities under the auspices of Buddhist or Shinto authorities. It is at this point that Ambros begins to engage more actively with broader issues within Buddhist studies, such as the honji suijaku theory that sublimates kami into the Buddhist pantheon. Ambros also engages with pilgrimage studies, such as Eade and Sallnow's view of a shrine as constituting empty space accommodating of multiple meanings and practices. Here, Emplacing a Pilgrimage is more overtly theoretical, but its foundation is still textual evidence. For example, Ambros shows the contestation between Buddhist doctrine and Nativist Shinto's (kokugaku) rejections thereof through the evolution of Shingon texts regarding Ōyama's deities, such as the Ōyama jiki and Ōyama Fudō reigenki, as well as the later Nativist response as seen in Sudō Shideo's Afurijinja kodenkō.
Ambros concludes the story of Ōyama in the early modern period by discussing the transformation of the mountain from a site of Buddhist authority to a site controlled by a Sect Shinto organization during the Meiji period. This concludes the work on two levels. Historically, it brings the reader to the close of the early modern period and the threshold of modernity in Japan. From a narrative perspective, Ambros argues against seeing the transformation of Ōyama solely as a result of the Meiji regime's 1868 decreed disassociation of buddhas and kami. She argues, rather, that it was the result of the culmination of economic tensions between the Shingon clergy and oshi over control of income from pilgrims, as well as the inevitable result of the weakening of Shingon control over Ōyama as the bakufu's economic support of the clergy waned. This conflict, when paired with Shingon's weakened state resulted in the oshi turning to Nativist Shinto as an alternative source of legitimation.
In Emplacing a Pilgrimage, Ambros sets an ambitious goal to offer a thick description of a specific case of pilgrimage using institutional, economic, political, and social perspectives that firmly locate the site and pilgrimage practices in a particular historical and geographic context. In doing so, she implicitly, and at times explicitly, rejects certain methodologies commonly applied to pilgrimage. Ambros rejects the Eliadian description of pilgrimage sites, mountains in particular, as axis mundi and instead argues that such sites must be understood as sociocultural constructs. Additionally, Ambros argues against Turner's view that pilgrimages negate ordinary social hierarchy by asserting that the Ōyama pilgrimage reinforced such hierarchies. However, Ambros avoids delving deeply into theoretical arguments and relies instead on the social, material, and doctrinal history of Ōyama to justify her views on pilgrimage in Japan, thus addressing issues in pilgrimage studies without diversions on theoretical tangents.
By relying on solid historical research and clear, lucid writing, Ambros persuasively demonstrates the merits of examining pilgrimage sites as specific locales operating within a regional context rather than assuming that pilgrimage sites are best understood within transhistorical and transcultural theoretical models. Moreover, Ambros ably employs her discussion of Ōyama as a means to better explore the institutions, practices, and concerns of early modern religion in Japan, such as the popularity of mountain pilgrimages, importance of purification rituals, and the relationship between Shinto and Buddhism.
